It is our responsibility – as designers, developers, salespeople, etc. – to educate customers as we build a relationship with them. Setting expectations as early on as possible and explaining deliverables is key to creating and sustaining a healthy client/company relationship.

Failing to educate a client can cost you money.

Search Engines

With all of the sites we create at PowerServe we do an initial site submission to Yahoo!, Google and MSN upon completion of a project. We explain to clients that it may take several weeks before spiders start crawling their site. The initial submission is not a magic bullet. It does not guarantee inclusion in any of the engines, nor does it guarantee placement. If this is not explained to clients, they might assume we haven’t done our jobs.

Search Engine Optimization takes a lot of time and effort. It’s a combination of optimizing TITLEs, META keywords, META descriptions, and CONTENT among other things! In order to improve placement on search engines, you have to keep your content fresh and relevant to your keywords, descriptions and titles. The time and effort involved in successfully optimizing a site for search engines can be costly. SEO can be a crap shoot most of the time, and tweaks you make to any of the elements of your site can positively or negatively effect your placement on search engines. You’ve constantly got to educate yourself on the latest strategies. Customers need to understand all the work that is involved in Search Engine Optimization.

Design

Design takes time. Design isn’t easy. Just because tools are readily available to allow home users to publish websites or to create basic graphics, does not mean that it is easy to do graphic design or web design. Paying a professional to design a website or an ad or a brochure, etc. for you buys their expertise and their ideas, which are things no program can buy you.

Sites made by Front Page or Publisher, for instance, look unprofessional.