We have been busy with a lot of projects lately and its been a while since I have posted anything.  Today I had a conversation that I have had I have had many times before and no matter how many times it comes up, it always manages to get me fired up.

“Web Designers” these days seem to be everywhere you turn.  Many of them have very nice looking, elaborate websites, but how many of them are what I would call a true “Web Designer”.  Web design to me isn’t just creating a site that looks nice and has form, but one that also has function. 

With a lot of todays tools and 3rd party solutions creating a clean and nice looking site isn’t as difficult as it used to be.  Some tools even provide sites that have a lot of functionality, but what really gets me is when I look at the code behind the scenes.  I hate to even mention another design firm on our site, but take Kathleen States, for example (http://www.kathleenstates.com/).  Yeah her site looks nice and has some “cool” functionality, but its missing meta-tags.   

For those of you who don’t know what meta-tags are, they are the basic elements many search engines use to rank and file your site and determine how your page shows up in their search results.  Meta-tags in conjunction with many other “trade secrets” help increase the relevancy of a web site and have a great impact on how successful a web site will be.  How can someone who claims to build web sites for a living not know this?  How can you charge someone to build a site that people may never see?  What’s the benefit of having a nice looking site if nobody every finds it?

It just frustrates me when people buy a few tools and build a few sites and then claim to be a web designer.  It frustrates me even more that business people get duped by these supposed “Web Designers” all the time and often spend good money for what I would consider to be an unacceptable product.  This is why I refer to myself as a Web Consultant and NOT a “Web Designer”.

There is a lot more to building a successful website than most people realize, so be careful when choosing a company or individual to do your site and take the time to do some research.  A decent portfolio is only part of what you should consider…