Sometimes its best to leave the website alone unless you really know what you are doing or why you are doing it, we recently took over development of a site after the website owner made the requests below that resulted in a 80% reduction in visitor numbers to their website as they removed the majority of the content on their website.
[Website Owners] We are looking at updating the content on the main website. Are you able please to confirm if we have access? Indeed, would you be interested in our getting together sometime soon in order for you to quote? Are you free on Monday please? I’d like to make some immediate changes to the site. Chargeable of course, say 5 hours? How much is that going to cost us for these website updates?
[Website Designers] Happy to update / change your website content / structure / SEO at any point. Your full website isn’t CMS enabled (only your news section) Normally clients tell us what you want to achieve and we can tell you the best way forward and give you some options. Reading below I see a 3rd party that aren’t website designers are asking for access to your website for a website designer that they use below, that is not recommended or permitted by us (we don’t give 3rd parties access to our servers due to the damage to your website that they could cause). Happy and available to talk about any updates / plans / changes you have in mind and look forward to your reply.
The way we work best is if you give us a list of what you want changing and we get it put in our work queue and get one of our developers to do it for you
[Website Owners] As I said, this is extremely urgent now please. If we can get done over the weekend for approval on Monday, that would be great. Otherwise, I’d be happy to travel to one of your developers on Monday. Either way, please let me have a price or estimated time asap so that I can process an order. Once this is done, I’ll get:
a) add new content with you
b) improve mobile / tablet access
c) implement SEO properly.
Google search
We need to get our new website ranked in Google above the old one Google’s listings
Optimise the whole site for for London
Home and About page
Delete all content and add “This section of our website is under re-construction and due to be completed by April. Until this time, please feel free to contact Head of Business Development for further information
[Website Designers] Why not have three main services here as that will avoid the need to recode the sections/ re-create the images for this section? Aesthetically it will look better with 3 sections here also.
If you decide not to offers something and its no longer to be a service then I suggest changing this box title / link / photo to something else relevant or even reference the main service with a different name.
Have made some changes, the removal of the content will be counter productive / postive for SEO until the new content (text is provided). As you know SEO is an detailed function and more advanced SEO can always be completed.
After you heard my reservations on these changes (that they seem counter intuitive and will eventually negatively affect SEO / website ranking etc) we have acknowledged your points and made the changes, there are comments in green below. Please check and review. I appreciate your need for urgency with these changes and have got one of the developers to review your changes and make updates immediately for you. I hope our speed of change is appreciated as have re-arranged our work to fit this in.
You have directed us to 8 pages for changes and where you have directed us to delete content we have deleted this content in this page but not the sub-pages on that section (example about page has had the content deleted but not the section under it.
Current Google Primary search Results snapshot (current website optimised for Essex) are 14th 9th 10th
Optimise for Essex, not London
Have made quite a few changes making Essex more prominent than London on the site
Disagree that changing the Headers are an improvement – as the header bars lend themselves to have left justified text on them
Disagree that changing the revolving main page photos to a single photo is an improvement additionally there is SEO and website usability reasons why these revolving images should stay.
You have said you will come back to me next week re content. You said you suspect we’ll need to re-arrange all the links on the Home page as will want the next text / content to be seen at maximum size, so will probably want to sit with you and do all of that.
I am happy to sit down and go though / talk through any changes, your requests up to now are quite drastic and by removing the majority of the text on the site I fear that there will be a ‘hit’ from Google for this and am anxious to have more content to replace the old text and to be given a clear direction about where we are going with both websites.