Any decent web designer/developer knows and understands the idea of best web practices, but what to do when your client won’t cooperate?

This got to be the biggest bane of web pros:  clients who pay to have it done their way rather than pay a web pro to manage the project.

I’ve developed quite a bag of tricks to deliver the look of what they want — and learned to accept the inevitable: they pay money for a site and then they may well pay (with money or lack of income) for it over and over because they didn’t listen to a web expert in the first place.

So what do you do?

The issues: search engine optimization, load time, visual distraction, function and, once more, search engine optimization.
The action keywords: educate, negotiate and fronting (appear to give up the fight while working in the background).
The tools: CSS, image optimization, and a lot of creativity in flash and javascript.

The best example we’ve all heard more than once in our careers: “But I want a massive, fancy, moving flash at the head of my page!”

So…

Educate:

• explain how this hurts search engine optimization and therefore the website bottom line, i.e., importance of text, load time and positioning
• gently mention how some visitors are distracted by moving elements, using the key phrase, “it distracts from your message or purpose”
• explain the cost of the flash will not have a reasonable return on the money (I quote large prices for these kinds of flash objects)
• give up when you get a blank stare or “but I want…” in return

Negotiate:

• agree to a flash but require more text above it
• insist on driving the flash creation (charge him/her less, bribe, do whatever it takes to have some control over the flash itself)
• reduce the flash visual size
• move it to one side instead of all the way across
• agree to it only on the home page and use an image on subsequent pages.

Appearance:

• work to create the visual look he/she wants but creatively work in the html and CSS code to mitigate the effects such as using a div with a background to blend into the flash images and that contains keyword-driven text
• moving the flash div lower in the code with CSS positioning tricks
• don’t forget flash can have a transparent background – move large visuals out of the flash and into backgrounds where possible
• work to create a non-streaming flash that appears to stream by pre-loading images and watching the frame by frame load time
• switch to a javascript solution such a jquery that will enable the use of keywords and lessen load time but still have a fancy appearance (oh and it’s more “Web 2.0” – I do hate that phrase!)

I know a director of a state public health division who insisted on using certain fonts on the area website.  He wanted it to look a certain way on his computer and did not care about what anyone else saw. The employees did as they were told and the result is incredibly amateurish. Just ow!

When those in power are so shortsighted, well, eventually they will lose their job, retire or die.  We can only be patient.

In my next blog post, I’ll give an example of some of these techniques. so stay tuned.