New Site Vs. Cleaning Up A Site
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Jul 16, 2010
Are you a professional? Do you have a website? Does your website represent you as a professional?
Many professionals decide to create their own website using products such as MS Publisher, Frontpage, Word, etc. The thing about programs like these are that they use WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) technology, which makes it easy for them to use because they don’t have to learn code, but also creates many issues that don’t help them get the professional look they’re hoping for. Now, if you’re only creating one page, you can probably do a fairly competent job with things like this and move on with life. But almost every time, if you want to add more than the one page, things start going haywire.
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I recently had conversations with a couple of friends who do a lot of what I do. I asked one question; if you had your choice, would you rather create a new page from scratch or would you rather fix up a page someone created using WYSIWYG. Both said they’d must rather create from scratch, and that it would cost the client less to do so most of the time.
See, there’s the caveat… MOST of the time. Let me explain. Back in 2008 I wrote a post after I had finished working on a client’s site. He had used MS Publisher to create his site, and if he’d only stayed with the main page it wouldn’t have looked so bad. But every succeeding page looked different. The menu kept changing colors, the background moved around, he had a picture on one page that totally threw off the spacing, multiple fonts, sometimes multiple colored fonts… it was a mess. He did the best he could, but when he couldn’t get things looking right, he contacted me.
What I did for about 3 hours was try to remove code. He only had 10 pages, but there was so much code that it took me all that time to take care of 3 pages. That was ugly, and I was irritated. And I noticed that as I was removing code, his menu really wasn’t working anymore. It was totally skewed by Publisher because it had decided to create the menu on each page as an image, which means I couldn’t make it standard. Eventually what I decided to do was recreate his first page cleanly, figuring out his colors and changing a few, and that included his menu. It took a couple of hours, but once I got it done I then had a template that worked for all of the rest of his pages except one.
That was the one page with the image, and it took me a couple of hours trying to figure out how to get everything on that page to balance with all the other pages based on the new template. Eventually I got it figured out, moved all the other content, uploaded to his new host and all was right with the world. That took 10 hours to do, but would have taken much longer if I hadn’t been able to just create the template.
Recently I did another similar project. This one wasn’t as simple; more pages, more pages that were designed differently than the other pages. This was going to involve removing code, but also adding code. WYSIWYG allows for some formatting things that it doesn’t necessarily add code for, such as numbering and listing items, and it sometimes does some funky things with images. If you’ve ever noticed how some blogs have images that sit above or below the content instead of having the content wrap around images, like mine, you can bet those sites are most probably set up for WYSIWYG, although depending on the theme sometimes you’ll need to add some code to get those images to look right (I do).
Anyway, I had to remove a lot of code. Because of some tables on some pages, I couldn’t just create a template page for everything. However, I’ve learned some lessons over the years, and one is that when you can, copy newly cleaned code from one page to the other, always making sure to put it in the same place. That helped greatly when it came to the business name and the menus , and probably saved at least 3 hours of coding; many pages on the site, as I said. I found a few other places where I was able to do something similar, all saving time, and the final thing I did was to create a CSS file so that colors and fonts and other specialty things could be handled from one place.
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Of course, there’s still the little bit of extra coding one does when fixing things, and it’s always wise to make a copy of a page so that you remember what things looked like before you started so you can try to put them back where they belong. But it’s always important to make sure a website has some type of balance. If your site has a title, the title should always be in the same place. If it has a menu, the menu should always be in the same place. Think of it this way; if you were looking for someone to take care of you and went online to search, unless you knew them wouldn’t you potentially gauge their competence by how smooth their website was? No one needs to be perfect; you just look for some things to be standard so you can navigate through a site easily enough.
Oh, by the way; it only took me 13 hours to do more than 3 times the pages of the first site. We’re always learning more efficient ways to do our work so that we can hopefully save clients money and ourselves time and frustration. When you can, it’s probably better to allow the person working on your website to redesign certain things that will still look good but save you money. When you can’t, just acknowledge that it’s going to take time, that time costs money, and either bite the bullet or make changes one step at a time. That’s harder to do when you want a professional looking site, but you can only pay for what you can pay for. Yes, I meant to say that. 
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
The Client’s Finished Product
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Jun 25, 2008
So, here’s the follow up to my post on having to try to fix a client’s website when he created it from Microsoft Publisher.
I did indeed have the beginnings of a workable template. However, the menu was problematic. MS Publisher had created the menu as an image also, and the client had put both a heading at the top of the menu, then this little picture under that, followed by the menu. He had told me he wasn’t crazy about the menu because he’d wanted this blend of colors, but the menu broke them all out so that everything looked choppy, plus he couldn’t get the same size and effect on every page. By the way, I hate WYSIWYG products because they throw so much code in on their own and don’t ever quite allow people to get everything balanced properly.
The first thing I tried was just cropping the picture out of there, then typing his heading and adding the picture, then the menu. It looked okay, but all the links suddenly wouldn’t work. That wasn’t going to do, so I decided to eliminate the menu he had and fill each area with a color that was in the middle of all the colors he’d chosen, and then darken the menu headings so that he’d have all his menu items and all would be great with the world once again. That way, I could make everything uniform, which would look smoother, and it’s what he really wanted in the end.
After that, I tried typing in his little heading and adding his image, but for some reason everything wouldn’t stay aligned the way it was before. The image kept wanting to go to the top; that wasn’t going to do. I’d tried to separate the heading and the picture by using the < tr> and < td > tags, but instead I decided to put them in the same tag, and use < br > to drop the picture lower. That worked perfectly; whew!
The final big piece was that he’d created all his pages with generic names; well, he didn’t, Publisher did. So, after the index page it was page2.html, page3.html, etc. I changed all the page titles to what each page was supposed to be about, within reason of course, so that it would at least give me a change to optimize the pages. So, each page has its own wording in the links that comes close to matching the title; that was good stuff, but I have to admit that I thought about it last minute. I was looking to just get done after all the trouble with the first page, then realized that wouldn’t help me any.
After that, I went back to each page, changed the title headings, put in a different description and meta tags, then formatted his bottom menu so it was centered, and decided to make his email address a link that will open up a person’s email client; hey, that’s not a bad way to go. The only minor problem I felt I had was that, since he’d written all the copy and wanted it that way, I found it hard to optimize so that it would help him in the search engines. It’s not a traditional business model, but I did what I could with it. He had already bolded certain phrases, so I went with those.
At this point, the job is done; the only thing left is for him to tell me which hosting package he’s purchased and where I can upload it so that he’ll be good to go. For testing, I uploaded it all onto one of my sites, obviously having to change the link for his index page because I have my own index page on that site, but it was only for testing anyway.
I’m proud of myself for figuring it all out, and keeping it at 10 hours, which was my goal. He’s happy also; whew! There is one page where I didn’t change any of the coding, because he wanted everything in a particular format, and I just wasn’t interested in trying to figure out how to change it all; plus, it was only text, so it was smarter to leave it alone. It’s ugly, but it works just fine.
As a plug, the work was done under one of my other business names, SEO Xcellence; just thought I deserved to give myself a little love.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
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