Newbie web design broker

April 27, 200917 yr

Hello everyone,

I am a newbie to web design and SEO. I'm not an expert by any stretch of the imagination but I do know enough to get me into trouble

My background is in people development and business improvement, which I've been doing now for about 17 years. I been tinkering with website design, more as a hobby, for about the last 10years, so I know a bit but I'm only a tinkerer really.

I have started a web design and seo brokerage, which I hope will provide a genuine need to combat some poor quality with the marketplace. My rationale is based on my own personal experience. About a year ago, I approached some web design companies who professed to offer the whole range of services, about redesigning a website for my company (one which I had previously built myself). The reason for the rebuild was more to reflect the changing nature of my business and I didn't have time to do it myself.

So, having explored a number of web design companies, I plumped for the one that seemed to fit the bill best. I told them about my design style requirements, told them I wanted it to be simple and easy to use and told them I wanted it to work well with the search engines.

What I got was a good looking design, which I was happy with, a google analytics account, all uploaded blah blah blah, as you'd expect. So imagine my surprise when the traffic stats went through the floor straight after it was uploaded. I was told it would take a bit of time for it to come back again (which I didn't believe).

Anyway, long story short, the so-called web designer had missed some serious bits out of my page coding (keywords and description tags), they had failed to exclude my own visits from the google analytics stats, they had used a dreamweaver template that was locked and as I understand it, doesn't fare as well in the search engines. Basically, they had commited a number of key errors in designing an effective website.

What worried me most (which I should have picked up on at the time) was the lack of real interrogation or digging as to my real needs. They took very little time to really understand my business, or the requirement for the website. There were no metrics around success of performance other than, did I like it. This company (in my view) had web designers who created great looking websites and probably understood some of the techy stuff to make things happen in a certain way, but they weren't commercial, business focused or results focused.

That's when I decided to set up my company. As I said, I'm not really a web designer as such, but I am a very good business improvement consultant. So my thinking is, that if I can provide the consultancy expertise to a client to ensure the real requirements are understood and challenged, the project has metrics to prove success then I could engage specific technical and design experts to translate this into reality. Hence, it's more of a brokerage.

I would like to use this forum as a means of sourcing advice and answers to particular problems and challenges I face when I get client requirements that need technical expertise, outside my ability.

I am also looking to engage on a freelance basis web designers, seo and back office programming experts who would welcome the opportunity to focus on what they do best and leave the business consultancy to me. My intention is not to use anyone and everyone but more a select group of individuals who prove they really are experts and fit with me culturally. This is in order to provide more opportunities to less people rather than the odd piece of work to many people.

So there you are, that's me. Drop me a message or e-mail with your thoughts, replies and interest in working with me on my new venture.

Regards

Andy H.