You clearly only work for organisations with a CMMI level of “manage” or above. Most organisations putting up web sites are not so blessed.

Much of what I do is troubleshooting. Here’s an example from yesterday:

A moderately large page count web fronted database site with an extensive product catalog. Assume that several hundred items are added, removed or modified every day (that’s several hundred of each operation). Assume that the site is poorly designed for flow, taxonomy and ontology. Assume that it has been assembled by people who haven’t bothered to generate a Last-Modified Date – so the SE’s can’t tell what is up to date and what hasn’t been touched, requiring exhaustive crawling as the only way to find new stuff. A quarter of the links are 400 (not 404, but 400). A quarter of the remainder are 404. Some pages are delivered blank if there is nothing of that description in stock. There are missing category pages – there’s simply no stable URL for anything resembling a category page, for 80-90% of the products. All of the Titles and Descriptions are templated – such that 75% of the site has grammatically nonsensical descriptions in the Search Engines.

Add a further constraint. The budget to solve this is only high enough to allow one of your specialist roles to work on the project. Which specialist will you choose?

I used skills from programming, system admin, UI design, marketing communications, DB administration, sitemaps, the robot exclusion protocol, knowledge management, social media, and about 14 years experience of web sites… Because the goal is to turn that site into a high ranking, high traffic site, that users will value. It is do-able, and it is do-able for less than the cost of redesigning from scratch – which is what I’d prefer to do, if there were time and budget enough. There will be some changes, but remarkably fewer changes than a whole site redesign. It won’t get as much rank as a fully redesigned site will do, but this will give the business enough trade that it can contemplate doing so, next year.

I’m quite annoyed by link spammers, too. But I don’t go calling web designers bullshit, just because the majority of sites that I see are the products of ignorance and incompetence.

Cheers, JeremyC.

My background in almost entirely in usability.
In a typical large project, we identify the target users and build a site for them.
This means, using the words they use. This means writing content they are interested in. This means make the site behave the way they expect it to. This means designing a simple user flow through the store/app/site/whatever.

We hand our work over to programmers. They build it using XHTML 1.1 strict compliance. We only use Flash where absolutely necessary, as it’s nearly always a requirement that our sites are AA compliant. Accessibility is something we take very seriously.

When the system administrators go to launch the site, we instruct them (though they know already) to re-target all the URLs correctly.

All of these things we did before SEO was an internet craze. The reason SEO is associated with buying spammy links, is because it is one activities that has come along because of it.

Every example you mentioned, falls into a different discipline in my opinion, whether it’s usability, design, programming, content creation, marketing, system administration. I like that SEO people are skilled in all these areas, it frustrates me though that they’ve relabelled it as something new, when it shouldn’t really be.

Furthermore, the sleazier ones have made life tough for us, as they’re promising potential clients all sorts of crazy things, that they simply can’t deliver.

Regards,
Des