BlogSmall business, Marketing, Promotion and Web Design

One of the problems while dealing with clients – is the problem with clients that don’t know what they want.
A client I work with on initial drafts (in fact it’s a group of 6 people, most of them – women of various ages) has rejected six initial drafts – more or less original from my personal point of view. We have discussed the situation and decided to give a client an opportunity to express themselves in how they see their web site. In a less then a week (given we spent almost 3 weeks on all the drafts so far), in fact – over the weekend, they provided us with a black and white drawing with desired elements and layout. Obviously no one expected the work of art, that is understandable. But this…
Most of the pieces were pulled together from other web sites, no originality of any kind is present. Generally it looks like that Checkhov story, when a young girl, contemplating marriage, wanted to take nose from one man, add it to the face of second, add mustache of third, ears from fourth and so on.
Very strong resemblance, actually…

On the subject of SEO (search engine optimization) – found very interesting conversation on one of the russian forums that discussed doorway making as opposed to “white” optimization methods for web site promotion. Basically, doorway making is considered “black” kind of a deal because it’s cheap, it’s fast, it’s effective and it messes up search engine output. “White” methods are just as effective, but slow, expensive and don’t mess up search engines’ output. In other words – the truth is somewhere in between, I suspect. Those, who need immediate results use cheaper and faster methods while more stable companies will use more expensive but more “stable” results.

Speaking of “more stable” results I recalled that some time ago the US Robotics web site was swarming with invisible text, invisible keywords, invisible links and other “dark side” stuff. Checked it today and the stuff has magically disappeared. Probably recent events with BMW.de played huge role in that…

One of my current clients – russian-speaking radio station GenerationNX.com are preparing to move to a newer, faster server. One of the problems they are facing is e-mail migration.

For certain obvious reasons I want them to have a copy of all archived e-mails that they have stored on the server. They’re using plain old POP3 mail boxes with web mail access. As it turned out today – most of the mail was NOT deleted (and is not being deleted, for all I know) and kept in inbox. We’re talking about 18,000 e-mail messages, 99% of which is spam. Why? I wish I knew.

So now, second hour in the row together with client we’re cleaning their mailboxes from spam.
Because, you know, there might be a diamond in the rough…