Unraveling the Leftovers

Sad Story
On about a weekly basis, we comes across hard working, educated, smart people, who have been mis-guided into paying big bucks (10’s of thousands of dollars sometimes) for a shiny new website they hate:
 
“My WordPress site looks great after 1 year of rebuilding and tweaking…and we hate it. The template we used to customize sucked, the code is crap, SEO has literally dropped into nothingness and I (unbelievably) want to start over.”
 
This is hard pill for us to swallow and it genuinely makes our good heart hurt. When we have looked at the back end of many-a-WordPress site, it often reveals the ugly truth about how many self-titled designers and developers are really just good sales people. We are truly saddened over how many of our prospects have been taken to the cleaners.
 
Buyers Beware
Often times a website developer will use a WordPress stock theme such as ThemeForest, and fill it with a gazillion shortcodes making it nearly impossible for anyone else to work on or modify on the back end. Really poor business practice as it is a sneaky way for a developer to secure their position as the only one who can maintain the site.
 
Template sites are pretty girls on the outside, but if their inside core pages don’t contain quality content, their SEO will plummet.
 
A solid WordPress developer will use 301 redirects, and no broken links, which enforces powerful SEO.
 
Other SEO frights we come across include the over-use of h1 headers. Best website development practice is to only have one per page. This is basic coding and anyone with an adequate level of coding skill should know this requirement.
 
Poorly thought out page url’s are yet another common mistake that wreaks havoc on solid SEO. Or even worse, defaulted page titles.
 
WordPress developers can be like crooked car mechanics. Who really understands today’s computerized cars well enough to know if they need an engine rebuild, or just a tune-up?
 
How to Hire a Trusted Website Developer
Just like any other investment, research is key to making the best financial decision when it comes to building a website. Because we have experience as designers, developers, SEO and more, the cleanest line to a successful website is having it all done under one roof.
 
Our smartest clients have also taken the time to do at least one or more of the following:
 
• Meet us in person. It’s not always possible with our national or international clients, but we have found many of our clients ONLY want to work with local talent. They want to see and know we are real people that care about their outcome.
 
• Thoroughly investigate our website and blog posts to confirm we are trusted and check out the links that take them to websites we have designed and developed.
 
• Call and check out how happy our other clients are.
 
• Looked at our social media profiles for activity and positive 5-star reviews.
 
• Come to the conclusion that it will cost them far less in the long run to invest in a reputable website design company up front, than to pay that same company later to fix bad design, crazy code, and development, created by someone’s messy spaghetti experiment.
 
To find out more about excellence in web design and development, contact us.