Page 2 - web designers - why do they hate seos?

I experience a similar problem..... They hate us because basically we reviell there faults and they know it....

I designer actually had a company domain name registered to himself.... That didn't go-over to well.... Yea - after I reviewed the site and discovered how discusting it was designed in seo terms - he hated me.... That's okay though - I designed a new site for the company.... There now getting a number 1 listing.

Way to go clasione!

When I started to SEOing I always got questioned about every single thing I did. Even small stuff like renaming a page title or adding header tags. As soon as we hit 500,000 users a month my boss stopped asking SEO is a very niche career that will always be questioned because 95% of site owners dont know about it. I didn't know about SEO until 4 years after I started web design. Now that I know about SEO so I dont do even web design anymore. Better career move for me :p

The fact remains in my experience that SEO is a niche career, and that most people do not understand, much less have the patience to do what some of us optimizers do. I on any given week optimize more sites than I own, and thats a lot, and most of those sites come from relationships I have developed with web design firms. Web designers are always quick to make the first mistake in a proper design with SEO in mind. But at the same time, lets cut them some slack, for the most part they are quite uneducated about seo and the many facets that it undertakes...even when it comes to design itself. Some of want to do it by: flash it to death with no text, php code it way toooooo much, coldfusion as if its the only thing out there too program, database so its so complicated even they can't under it, layer it like a cake, spam everything to hell type design, and then again the basic designers that do simple sites with bad graphics. I still learn so many new things each day, and ways to better my professional career its hard to keep up with it all.
I first take the approach, its way better to educate them first and set some boundries then to explain step by step. We shouldn't have to do that to begin with. Point them to this forum or others and some good articles and tell them this is how its going to be, please trust me.

:grin:

you guys make me laugh-out-fukin-loud.
....like i just spit out my gum i laughed so violently.

i do design and seo and the only people that have proplems are the hosting companys :-P

Part of the problem is knowledge. there's lots of people out there (on both sides of the fence) who fancy themself a designer or an SEO, but don't really know much and do a hacky job. Probably more designers, but only b/c the market is bigger - can't SEO a page that hasn't been designed, but you can design a page w/o seo.

Anyway, since bad designers don't really understand a lot about designing with standards and accessability, when you mess with their photoshop sliced template they made, the results can be dramatic.

Likewise, there are SEOs who have no sense of design. When I started working at my current job for an internet marketing company, my boss said if it were up to him a site would be nothing but h1-h6 then p tags. So SEOs don't get that people won't by from a site that looks like s***, they think if it ranks it must rock.

Begin with the end in mind....

If you want a site to rank in the SERPs... and I mean rank really well on lots of terms.... then you gotta have that in mind before the first page is completed.

When I design a new site, I do the keyword research and navigation planning FIRST. The results of this work will dictate some of the design.

There are lots of designers who produce snazzy gee-whiz sites that sit in the SERPs at #376. The designer and the hosting company are the only people who make any money from those sites.

I would rather have a butt ugly site that makes money than a gee-whiz site that doesn't see sunshine. (but this site would probably have a higher conversion rate if it had a little better appearance)

But, the best situation of all is a site that is done by someone who knows SEO and has some design ability (or who is willing to hire someone to do this under their direction). And, don't leave out the knowledge of the busniess owner who knows the words used by people to describe and ask for his product and the questions that arise in the day to day business.

Successful websites are all about teamwork and all of the talents needed rarely converge in a single person. If the work of the SEO or Designer or the business owner is left out at the beginning then the site will either need lots of reworking or it will only be a fractional producer.

this a universal truth about any type of activity, business and undertaking.
furthermore....all the players need to be talented in their own rights and willing to acknowledge the talent and expertise of the other players.
[the reason this thread took so long to come around to this simple concept is that is was used as more of an opportunity to 'bash' the 'other players' than it was about anyone looking for anything useful to say.] [with a few exceptions]

sure....pick on the hosting companies who arent here to defend themselves.
i guess someone had to be the loser of this debate. :-D

What designer worth their salt can't write their own mark up and css? I mean writing the css is 50% of the actual design (you know assuming its css based site) I do agree the work needs to be divied up at the start of the process, but it seems like your role for designers is very narrow.

requiem...narrow...yes.

Yeah, but I said that back when I first replied to this thread; there's a lot of people who fancy themselves (web)designers, but aren't very good. A real (web)designer is just as infrequent as an SEO who doesn't just buy a wad of PR. I would hazard a guess, that if you took 20 people who claim to be SEO specialists, they wouldn't know a div from a span and an img from an object

HahaHaha! Frontpage... my arch nemesis.

The internet is a rather egalitarian place; everyone can be anything. Pharmacist with a drug affiliate, web designer, seo. Everyone thinks they are a "business" owner...

guess what requiem....
most seo people are not excellent either.
and guess what....
NEWSFLASH!........