What happens when a website re-design goes wrong..

Posted 9 months, 1 week ago at 4:03 pm. 0 comments

It’s not often I read magazines, I despise the fact that most of the time they are full of lies, their sole purpose is to write articles that are “Interesting” and to which they can make reference to brands, ideas and other things that pay the bills!

The best one I’ve read so far goes to explain the revamp of a website, www.andysturgeon.com

His website ranks extremely high for “Garden Design” on google, even though his new redesign sucks, and his SEO is that of an India “$199″ website! I can see it slowly losing rank from now on.

SEO Centro supply me with what I think is an absolute GEM of a tool “Meta Tag Analyzer“, it checks your meta tag relevancy with your page content, it’s worth using no matter how brilliant you think you are.

Anyway, we put in “Andy’s” site and look what happens;

Meta tags analysis.
Title:	Title relevancy to page content is very poor. The Title relevancy to page content is 25%.
Description:	Description meta tag is too long. This tag contains 294 characters. This is too many for what we would consider a ‘robot friendly’ description. The maximum number of characters we recommend for this tag is 200. Description meta tag relevancy to page content is poor. The Description meta tag relevancy to page content is 32%.
Keywords:	Keywords meta tag relevancy to page content is very poor. The keywords meta tag relevancy to page content is 33%.
Robots:	The Robots meta tag contains no errors. This tag contains 13 characters.

Prior to this “ReDesign” his website’s SEO wasn’t that bad, but now, well his front page makes no reference what so ever to the word Garden Design!

This is what happens when inexperienced web designers or people start writing content for their website, and not have it checked over with a professional.  I am no self confessed Lecturer of English so I will not laugh or poke fun at the written content, only that it has not been written with keywords in mind!

His previous website, so I hear has been the same for the past 6+ years, however I recommend ANYONE who wants to rank at all on Google to update their website at least monthly, often updates make your website stand out, after all what’s the point in reading a website 5 years old? And I dont mean a redesign, I mean a content review, a keyword review, and a image review.  Google Analytics provides a brilliant feature of being able to have an overlay on your website and see where people are clicking!  You then know to make the “Hot Spot” area’s flawless, with plenty of CtA (Call to Action).

The other point is if your website is over a year old, its likely to look dated, not have the latest product range on it, and suffer greatly.

A direct quote from the magazine was “As a rough guide, budget for upwards of £1,000, to cover the design and technical build of your site”.

Well, that’s quite lax, does not state for how many pages or for what sort of content!  £1,000 for a 3page website is expensive in my opinion, however it all depends on the Services you will receive with it!

At the end of the day I think poor Andy Sturgeon has spent £1,000 give or take a few quid for a website no better than his previous website, infact I would say worse.  I have no idea where he found this clown who still uses tables and Styles in HTML when he has a style sheet too, I suppose it must have been a spur of the moment “eBay” purchase!

Do not make the same mistake!