We have been building more one page websites for clients lately.  There is something nice about building an attractive one page online listing for a client.

For the client it is a great way to get online for a low initial cost.  It allows them to concentrate on their branding and not have to create pages of content.

A great example of this is the new Capital Renovation site.   TayloeGray built this site for a friend’s new company,  a Raleigh North Carolina Home and Commercial Renovations company.  We also made a single page site for Prissies.com where we used Paypal and the clients image for a boutique sock manufacture.

My new company, TayloeGray, just launched a cool new site. Saturn Capital Management is an actively traded and managed long/short equity fund.  Unfortunately, you can see any of the content without being approved as an acreditied investor.

There is not much that makes me more angry than creating artificial barriers to exit for the purpose of forcing clients to stay with you.  Godaddy is a prime example of this.  It is a huge pain to move a website and all the files away from them.

I have a client who has outgrown Godaddy’s hosting and I am moving them over to MediaTemple, who provides scalable hosting for high traffic and database intensive websites.

The site is made up of four open source web based applications:

1. Wordpress for content management
2. OpenX for banner advertisement serving
3. phpBB for web forums
4. Gallery2 for a photo gallery

Each of these applications has a separate file structure and an individual database on Godaddy.  Much of the content has been uploaded to the application and the easiest way to move the site would be to Zip or Tar the entire site, backup the databases and move the files over to the new hosting.  I have probably done this thirty times in my life.  It is pretty straight forward and most of the time is spent watching files transfer.

Godaddy has made this impossible for the following reasons.

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Just a word of warning about the dangers of malformed HTML on your web site.

One of my clients, who shall remain nameless, used a free HTML WYSIWYG editor to make edits to the text of their website.  This editor created a block of text that was improperly wrapped in <MAP> HTML tags.  A MAP tag defines a client-side image-map,  an image with clickable regions.  As a result the text was hidden from the browser.

After a little more than a week, they received this message via email from Google. ( the url has been changed)

Dear site owner or webmaster of ********.com,

While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that were outside our quality guidelines, which can be found here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, we have temporarily removed some webpages from our search results. Currently pages from ********.com are scheduled to be removed for at least 30 days.

Specifically, we detected the following practices on your webpages:

* The following hidden text on ********.com:

It then went on to display the text in question.

As a result they were dropped from the organic search results on Google.  This was particullly bad because it was over the weekend prior to the start of national television campaign.  The owner gave me a call on late on Sunday night and we started working on a plan.

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“In April 2007, A List Apart and An Event Apart conducted a survey of people who make websites. Close to 33,000 web professionals answered the survey’s 37 questions, providing the first data ever collected on the business of web design and development as practiced in the U.S. and worldwide.”

This is an exhaustive survey of who makes websites, including Project Managers, Webmasters, Developers and Creative Directors .

Some interesting results:

• 72.5% have their own blog.
• 46.5% had a field of study unrelated to current web work.
• 32.2% have only been in their current job 1 year or less.
• Project Managers had the highest job satisfaction (51.6%), Webmasters, lowest (40.3%)

View results here http://www.alistapart.com/articles/2007surveyresults