Reasons to Not to Hire Offshore Web Designers

I've helped several clients that had hired offshore developers to design their website and inevitably they were ripped off and needed their website redesigned. The following are some problems to watch out for when considering hiring offshore web designers.

1. Unless they speak and write good English you may experience language difficulties.

2. Time zone differences may mean you can't call each other during business hours.

3. The designer being located in another country means you cannot meet face to face.

4. Cheaper hourly wages don't necessrily translate into quality work. Language difficulties can result in longer hours and higher design costs.

5. They cannot possibly understand marketing in the USA when living in a foreign country.

6. By hiring design work offshore you are hampering the employment of designers in the USA.

7. Paying for services in other countries can be very difficult, requiring foreign currency exchange and may incure extra banking expenses.

8. Even if "they" provide an escrow account you have no protection if it's located in another country.

9. There is an increased risk of identity theft when transfering funds from your bank to a foreign bank account.

10. Designers from other countries do not always operate with the same morals as designers in the US, i.e., they may copy the content off other websites and you won't know it until your site goes online and is penalized by the search engines. Guess who will be sued if this happens???

11. You'll have to give the designer the password to your hosting account so it should be someone you trust.

12. If you allow them to purchase the domain name for you they may put the domain in their name as the registrant, in which case you will be paying the domain fee, the design costs and hosting for a domain you don't even own. If you fire them you can loose everything and have to pay an exorbitant fee to get the domain back.

13. If they don't perform as they promised you have no recourse because US courts have no jurisdiction in other countries.

14. You may have to hire someone else to fix the website.

The old addage is true in this case:
You Get What You Paid For!

Lori Eldridge
Lori's Web Design
Copyright 7-22-08
All Rights Reserved

How to Outrank your Competitors in Local Search

There are several things you can do to outrank your competitors for local search. The following applies to the home page because it usually has higher PR (Page Rank) and likely to rank higher than your other pages.

1. Chose your major keyword phrase and include the name of your city and use that in a few places in the text of your page, i.e., "Blue Widgets Spokane Wa"

2. If you only want to rank well in your own city and you don't care about international or worldwide ranking then put the name of your city first before your keywords in your title, description and keyword tags.

3. If you want to rank internationally and worldwide put the name of your city after your main keywords in the description and keyword tags and last in your title.

4. Include the name of your city in image alt tags where appropriate.

5. Put the name of your city in your copyright statement

6. List your address and other contact information with the name of your city,

7. Write a page focused specifically on your city, including the city name in the alt tags of related images on that page, and include the city name in the file name of that page also and link to it from the home page.

8. Submit your site to Google and Yahoo's local search for your city.

9. Submit your site to local directories featuring your city.

10. Submit your site to directories that require you to submit in a regional category listing your city.

11. Consider moving to a host in your city if you live in a large metropolitan area. Otherwise a local host may not be a good idea unless you check them out thoroughly.

It won't do any good to stuff comment tags because search engines don't use them. Over doing repetition of your city name in the title, description or the text on the page or image alt tags can cause an overoptimization penalty so take it easy.

Lori Eldridge
Lori's Web Design
Copyright 7-20-08
All Rights Reserved