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Seven Things You Need to Tell Your Web Designer

November 3, 2015 By barrie@compassdesigns.net 1 Comment

Many businesses and organizations are still figuring out the process to get a professional web presence on the web. With social media now firmly in the mainstream, it’s harder than ever to understand what’s needed and what’s not as you build out an online web presence. These new layers mean that many businesses are returning to web “designers” to help them. Even though there is less and less design involved. More on that later.

Here are seven things you need to tell your web designer to make sure you are getting what you need.

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: business, social media, web, wordpress

How can Joomla ensure that quality support is available to clients?

October 25, 2011 By barrie@compassdesigns.net Leave a Comment

Yesterday, Heidi and I met with a wonderful group of women running a startup. They have a Joomla website, but they have had a nightmare dealing with their Joomla developer. Time after time, they have requested something to be done on their site, their developer says no problem, and the developer fails to deliver. Furthermore, the developer would send them invoices, charging hours and hours of time for “research”, which never materialized into a solution for their problems. The client was funding this developer’s learning curve, to no benefit of their own website!

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: business, Joomla

Can the Real Web Design Industry Please Stand Up

January 10, 2011 By barrie@compassdesigns.net Leave a Comment

They are charging $3500 for a website (that’s an average design using a Microsoft font logo) and charging for “updates”. Hello? This is the 21st century people, we don’t have updates. We build clients content management sites with things like Joomla and teach them how to easily update it themselves.

They have an awful lot of copy about SEO, and their SEO services. One bit of killer advice for their customers was to register multiple domains to “capture web real estate”. Unless I miss something, at best this will get you problems with PageRank dilution, at worst a possible duplicate content penalty of some kind.

Speaking of content penalties, they also offer a service of “pet health articles” and “newsletters”. It took me about 2 nanoseconds to find the exact same content on several hundred other vet websites. Somehow I don’t think that Google is going to find that fresh, valuable content – as claimed. I also don’t think its especially respectful to the vet’s customers to be fed content from a library bank. The web is for original content thank you very much!

Everytime I go to Joomla conference, I always seem to hear one story or another about “web designers” offering lackluster services at inflated prices. It seems that for some reason the “web design industry” seems to have a prevalence of these scenarios.

  • Are we missing some kid of licensure in our industry?
  • How do these practices continue, do we need to educate the customers?
  • Do you have a story like this to share?
  • Is licensure a real word?

Can the Real Web Design Industry Please Stand Up

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: business, design, seo, web

The Skinny

I am an entrepreneur, web consultant, author and educator.

I have been involved in starting a K-12 School District, a Private High School, and three web tech companies. I also wrote one of the original and best selling books on Joomla.

And I like sailing with kids.

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