How to be the worst web designer ever

After rescuing some sites this past month I’ve been inspired me to make a list summarizing all the messes I’ve had to help cleanup over the years. I’ve written this as an advice column for any bad web hosts or designers who just haven’t quite perfected the art of truly sucking to the point of being the ‘worst ever’.

Account Access:

• Keep all account passwords to yourself, make your client has to contact you for any change (and charge them for 1/2 hour work for any changes)
• Host their site under an account where you host other sites so you can’t give them full ftp/shell access to their files. This ensures they can never download a full copy of their site without asking you first, and that they realize their entire internet presences exists at your whim and they should be grateful you’re providing these services for them.
• If you have to actually give a whiny client access to their own site;
  • Only give them the most minimal level of access possible so they can’t possibly mess up YOUR work.
  • Make sure you don’t explain how to do anything useful like add new items to their menus or how the site is organized so they are confused and have to contact you to make change even though they could have done it themselves.
  • A nice touch here is to give them their own account but make all the files in that account owned by root or another account, so they can just see the files but not actually use them.

Domain Names:

• Host their site on a domain you own and that has nothing to do with their site. On the internet no one cares about the actual domain names, people just click on links so the words in the domain don’t matter.
• If you actually have to get them their own domain;
  • Register the domain of their choice, but do it under your name.
  • Charge them more than what it cost you for the registration, hey they don’t know any better and it took you time to do it.
  • Be sure to encourage them to get as long a name as possible so it has lots of keywords but near impossible to remember or tell anyone over the phone.
  • Use a really expensive registrar like Network Solutions and register their domain(s) under your account so they can’t access it themselves.
  • Make sure they get domain ID protection and lots of other useless services that the domain registrar offers (and with domain protection they wont know it’s under your name. Tee Hee!)
  • Encourage them to get every possible variation of their domain (.net, .org, info, .cc) but then never actually point any of those to the site.
  • OR Better yet, point them all to the site and make each one work independently, that way google will crawl all of them and the site will show up multiple times in search results. I mean, what are the odds google would notice or care about duplicate content?
  • Set their domain to redirect or frame yours in it so they don’t ever actually have access to the account where it’s stored.
• When/if they ever wise up and want to move to another host hold this domain for ransom, you bought it, you own it! So what if it’s their business name, this domain is yours. If they don’t pay your ransom be sure to either keep renewing it so they can never get it back on their own, or better yet if they are ignorant about how domain registrations work let it expire and let spammers & domain vultures get a hold of it before they realize they could have gotten it back. This way not only is their domain gone but spammers will fill it with all sorts of unsavory content that will insult and scare away any of their clients who visit.

Other services & licenses:

• Sign up for all 3rd party services associated with this site using your own e-mail accounts & logins.

  

• Make sure they client pays you for all licenses and support contracts, but keep them all under your name, after all YOU’RE the one who has to support this site, not the owner.

Search Engine Optimization

• Be sure to Search Engine ‘De-optimize’ their site whenever possible (this way you can charge them more to do this part right later on)
• Don’t use any unique page titles, headines or tags. Use a plugin or other tool to block any external links from the site so no other sites even know you’re linking to them.
• Put as much text as possible on the site using images of that text (and without alt tags).
• Don’t turn on permalink/Search-Engine-Friendly link so all URLs look like ?page-id=123 
• If you do use a permalink/Search-Engine-Friendly link make sure to have it auto add the .htm or .html at the end of every URL because that way it looks ‘real’ and official like one of those fancy hand made html sites from the 90’s.
• Put every keyword possible into the text & title of your site. There’s lots of room for a nice long title so be sure to put as much as possible up there. If possible sprinkle these keywords as many times as possible all over your pages text too. Don’t worry if this makes your site unreadable by actual visitors, your search engine rankings will skyrocket!

Site Content

• Be sure to put a ‘This site designed by’ link at the bottom of every page. Don’t ask the client if they are ok with you doing this, just do it and imply that it’s standard practice, after all you deserve credit for your ‘art’. After all dogs mark their territory, shouldn’t you?
• If you have to include any code libraries to assist with various features on your site be sure to set it to load these from the source site instead of having them stored locally on your server. That way your site visitors can load stuff from another site and decrease the load on your server, so what if they have to wonder why their browser is connecting to yahoo etc when they visit your site.
• Put the entire site on one really long page and just have the links at the top jump to anchors later on. Sure it takes a while to load and you have to scroll for 5 minutes to reach the bottom but it’s REALLY fast after that!
• Images
  • Don’t make thumbnails of any images, just resize the whole 10 megapixel photo to be 200 x 300. Everyone has broadband now right, so what if it takes longer to load?
  • Along these same lines, be sure to set all graphics to load off the site you found them at, they won’t notice or mind the additional bandwidth to their site.
  • Make sure you ignore any copyright limitations when you link to other peoples art & photos, hey if it’s on the net it’s free game.
  • Use a Flash wrapper for all your photos so they cant be viewed at all on ipods & ipads or other smaller mobile devices.
  • If you make any images or logos for a client only give them the file for the size they need for the site. The original layout file is your art and they shouldn’t have access to that. That way when they need to use anything in a print publication later on it insures more business for you! K’ching!

• Do everything with poorly coded HTML and don’t test it in multiple browsers. It looked good on your machine, that’s all that matters.
• Alt tags take a long time, son don’t bother. Visually challenged people or those using text only browsers don’t visit your site anyways so why cater to them?
• Use lots of frames and tables within tables within tables so any hand editing of the HTML will drive folks nuts.
• When handcoding be sure to embed the CSS in each page instead of using a central shared one, that way you can bill more hours for any minor aesthetic changes.
• If your client demands a CMS (content management system), be sure to use something expensive, or something custom coded and proprietary instead of a free open source solution that they could use elsewhere. This way clients can never move their site elsewhere without completely rebuilding it with since they are bound to your software. Charge more per month for this privilege.
• Have contact forms go to you and then forward the e-mails to the client as appropriate. Claim this is because you are filtering spam on their behalf.  To be extra slick, charge them extra for this ‘service’.
• Stall finishing the site until it’s time critical and then ask for more money. If they refuse then stop responding to them, especially when they find a new web designer willing to help take over.
• Put things like mailing address and phone number on an obscure page buried deep in the menu heirarchy. Who needs a phone number or physical address when they are on the internet? If anyone really needs the phone number they can use the phone book or can call information. Extra nice touch here, do this all within an image so the data can’t easily be copied & pasted, or crawled by google.

RSS Feeds

• Remove all links & RSS features from the site since after all if you don’t understand what it is it must not be important.
• Point all unique RSS feeds on the site to a single RSS feed of just your main page. This will stop people from being able to follow or monitor a single category or tag. You don’t want people to easily find or follow what they care about, it’s all or nothing baby!
• Make sure your RSS feed only includes a very short summary of the post, after all you want people to visit the site, not actually read the content. If they read the content somewhere else that doesn’t help the webstats, and that’s all that matters.

Other Suggestions

• If they are smart enough to leave you for another host/designer call & e-mail their new host and claim you own their site design and will sue them & your former client if they don’t remove it immediately. Google around and find some semi-legalese about copyright laws that may or not apply to this and paste references to them into your letter just so you sound more official and threatening. Be sure to cc a friend of yours and say in the letter you are cc-ing your lawyer.

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About this post – In the past month I was asked to help rescue several different websites from bad webhosts &/or bad web designers. Dealing with helping them get things fixed and moved is tedious but also strangely satisfying. Why satisfying?

1. Folks are grateful someone is willing to help them in a fair and reasonable manner, even when they are in need and desparate and would probably pay extra.
2. They appreciate the personal service and ‘extra mile’ effort required and are likely to be long term customers. Sometimes they even blog about it and give us a great referral to their friends.
3. And mostly, somewhere out there on the net a really ill-informed or just plain mean webhost/designer just lost an income stream. Karma!

Dealing with these sites inspired me to make this list summarizing all the messes I’ve had to help cleanup over the years. I’ve written this as an advice column for any bad web hosts or designers who just haven’t quite perfected the art of truly sucking to the point of being the ‘worst ever’. However, even if you are just a mere website owner, you may want to read this list. If any of these procedures match your current web host or designers standard practice, well maybe you should ask them about that. OR, if you want an objective full audit of your site & setup Nicole @ Breaking Even Communications and I offer a ‘Website Audit Service‘ which covers a broad list of areas we check, and the best thing .. if we find anything that needs work and you choose to hire us to help clean it up (not required), then we’ll credit the cost of the audit towards the work. I didn’t intend for this post to be a sales pitch about this but it just fit naturally so, why not?

• Disclaimer: In case any web designers/hosts I’ve cleaned up after when helping your former clients happen to read this post and think some of these apply to them – These are in no particular order and do not necessarily reflect any websites I or Svaha LLC host or have assisted with at any time (but between you and me, you know who you are, and shame on you!)
• All photos included here are from http://www.flickr.com/photos/hamptonroadspartnership and have been used under the Creative Commons license. Because another worst web designer thing to do is use someone else’s content without properly attributing it.
• Special thanks to Nicole @ Breaking Even Communications for her assistance with this entry (No seriously, as in actual help in writing it, not the “inspirational” help many other designers gave me when I encountered their messes).