D+6

I have come across some information about how websites are scored for rankings by Google’s webbots. A sitemap is the first place they look. After that, back-links from other sites are very effective. My developers did not provide any advice about this in response to my brief. They don’t see the need to advise – only to follow instructions – and only then when they can understand them. Frustrated,  I send back a replacement Chinese lexicon,  along with my usual fully configured .pdf examples of a Sitemap page and a Community page to show the logos of my distribution partners.

The engineer is apparently back in the office – but he doesn’t respond to my emails. I make contact with the Account Manager, who phones him and drops me a line to let me know. Not that it makes any difference. Still no work is being done on the site, and no-one is communicating with me. Tomorrow we’ll be a full week late. Late in the afternoon, I see that the second round of changes has been made – but some instructions have now been repeatedly ignored. In some cases, the engineer simply doesn’t understand what I mean – so I copy and paste the corrections myself, and say: “make it look  like this.”

One instruction is that all linked media should open in a new window (I don’t want purchasers being taken away from the main site, especially with no way back). The engineer doesn’t know how to do this. So I go into my other website, follow the procedure on my own media, and print the screens along the way. I send him a step by step picturegram of what to do to make the media open in their own windows. That seems to do the trick – for about 80% of them anyway.

The BUY NOW buttons still have the wrong functionality. They are all taking the buyer to a separate buy now page, where there are more clicks required. This is simply wrong. When a buyer clicks BUY NOW, the next thing he should see is the checkout.  So I make screen prints, create a pdf diagram, draw arrows with ticks to show the correct navigation, and arrows with crosses to show the wrong navigation.  Later, I check the site – and hurray – pictures seem to work. This time he understood.