The Case of the
Hijacked website:

The lesson to be learned from this website near-disaster is if your organization decides to "do-it-yourself" or hire an inexperienced designer, you should have an expert website designer or experienced webmaster at least give you a Second Opinion before launching. Now, on with the story...

"I recently re-opened my consulting practice after a 2-year sabbatical and knew that I needed to have a functioning website so prospective clients could learn more about my practice. I found an inexpensive, easy-to-use package and very quickly had a reasonably presentable site up and running. When I asked Bill Stocking of WebSiteRevamp to take a look at it and provide some feedback, What he found was startling!

• While my content was good, and the visual appearance was acceptable, he found that the technological structure had numerous flaws:
  
• The index page (home page) pointed to the software company that had provided the tool, not to my company!

Editors note: In essence, the home page had been "hijacked" to provide search engine advertising for the software company at the expense of their customer, the website owner.

• The content and graphics were set up in such a way that the search engines couldn't use them because much of the text had been converted into graphical images.
  
• The pages didn't have useable titles, "Meta-Tags" or file names - again preventing the search engines from gathering useful information from the site. Worse yet, there was no way to code these things into the pages with the software we used.
  
• The pages were too big and clumbersome causing them to download much slower than they should have for the content involved.

In other words, if I never wanted anyone to find me by using a search engine (yes, for "Generation 1", I assumed I would tell everyone about my site and then they would just go to it!), my site was just fine. But if I wanted to generate business by having people find me through a search engine, I had a loser.

Bill persuaded me that my "Generation 2" should come much sooner that I had planned. He led me through that process. We worked together on revisions to content and styling, and he developed all the necessary technical details to provide a highly searchable site.

We only had one face-to-face meeting - the rest was through electronic communications. He developed the new version attached to the WebsiteRevamp site so I could review the changes as we went along, and then, when it was ready, he uploaded it and replaced my earlier version. The total process took less than three weeks. Thanks, Bill for the hard work, and "pushing me in the right direction."

(While I'd encourage you to take a look at the results www.ayersmgmt.com - The owner has since retired.)

What the site looked like before we got to work:

Old Ayers Management site

Allan Ayers CMC, Principal,
Ayers Management Services