I was on my way to the office today when my cell phone rang. The lady phoned me after being referred by one of my clients and she was disheartened. She quickly explained to me that she has had a website live for nearly 5 years now and had several redesigns done on it by different web designers over the period of time costing her in access of R60k. During the 5 years period she has never had one referral, not even one! I told her that I would give her a call the moment I had a look at it and we will discuss her options. In my years in the industry I have received several similar requests, but this one was enough to cause me to go hit the punching bag for 5 minutes before returning her call.

The website had fantastic content and I was truly impress by her writing style as it grabbed my eyeballs and made me want to go to KZN with my next vacation. There were just a few basic problems with her site.

She had an image landing page with a “click to enter” button. Once I got to the internal pages I was shocked to see that the website had a JavaScript dropdown menu that couldn’t be indexed. In viewing the source code I could even see where the JS source code was borrowed from.

In terms of conversion rates and usability there was simply dull pages that looked like big advertising boards. It took about 4 hours of my time to just analyze and compile a suggestions report. It was clear to me that the web designer wasn’t a complete newbie and this made me even more angry as he should have known better. But this incident made me think!

Just what do web design companies sell to their clients. I personally would not just design and associate myself with any website as I feel reputation is of importance in our small industry. If she could pay R12k for this website, what should I charge for my websites (Sarcasm intended). Is it time that someone brings out a website where web design companies are being blacklisted? Is it fair to judge web designers that clearly have no idea what makes a website work? Is it the web designer’s responsibility to deliver a product that works or to deliver a product that the client (Who has no idea what works) demands? How can this be improved?

Any opinions?