He informed me that he found his Sacramento website designer in a local online classifieds and the price he offered was nearly half of what we had charged him. The two met in a local Sacramento coffee house and discussed what the designer would need to be able to accomplish in order to get his website done within his budget. As we have sadly seen time and time again, the Sacramento website designer promised Bill Gold at the price of lead. I guess Bill wasn't aware of the age old saying that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
The Sacramento website designer, who we later learned was just a young kid with no formal experience who worked out of his home, took several weeks to complete the website before submitting it to the search engines. It was only after the website was up live that he called Bill to tell him. Bill looked at the site and though he had no input whatsoever in the design, he was happy just to have the website up since it was on all of his printed materials.
After a few weeks Bill began looking up his common search terms making sure to put Sacramento in his request to lower the results and target local businesses. After being unable to find his website for weeks, he called his designer who told him it was possible that Google had not yet indexed his website and he would have to be patient. A few nights later Bill's wife looked for the website again and was able to find it sitting comfortably on page 12 of the search results. Bill called his Sacramento website designer the next day who explained to him that there wasn't anything he could do and Bill would just have to "hope" the website would magically climb the rankings.
Saying that a website will magically climb rankings without effort is a complete lie in most cases. If you have a Sacramento website designer telling you this, you should just close your checkbook and run for the hills. Search engines index you based on many factors, but they don't simply decide that you have waited long enough and move you up the rankings. Either your website design and optimization will need to improve or you will have to hope that someone else's Sacramento website goes down in flames.
So in walked Bill again to our office, wanting to know how much money he could save by having our Sacramento website designers optimize his website since we didn't do the initial design. Our website designers looked over his website and came back to me with the results. It was the worst thing I could tell a Sacramento business owner who had already paid a website designer to, in our opinion, do more damage than good.
Continued on A Sacramento Website Design Nightmare Part 3
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