It happens on a regular basis. A client comes to me with his finished site, proud of its spectacular look with moving graphics and fancy navigation that spins around when you hover over it with your mouse. After he proudly proclaims of his readiness to do internet marketing, I watch the deflation occur as I tell him his site will need to be entirely rebuilt if being found on the internet is important to him.
I cannot stress enough how important it is to include a marketing professional in your web design project. Moving graphics require coding that is not read by search engines. Too much of it surrounding your HTML (the content that is understood by search engines) is likely to be missed or skipped over. As a rule of thumb, keeping all moving graphics or text within the header of your site is the best policy for providing a “content rich” website that will have a much better chance at being found or ranking in the SERP’s
This is just one of the very important reasons you should include a web marketing professional in your web design project, however there are thousands of others. Often people lump web designers in with internet marketers and vice versa. What is important to remember is that although their services may overlap in relation to that website, their purpose is very different. A web designer is interested in two things 1. The way the site looks, and the client satisfaction in how it looks. Internet Marketing professionals care much less about how a site looks and more about its functionality for users and marketability to search engines. Asking or expecting your web designer to make your site “SEO Friendly” is like asking an electrician to build a house.
The biggest downside of excluding a marketing professional in the web design process is that trying to make changes after the fact is sometimes more difficult even impossible without a complete redesign. Internet marketing has a huge focus on code/content that is the framework of your website. Just like a house, if you take the frame away the entire house comes crashing down.
