I had a busy weekend. There was a little reading and a little knitting (I’m almost through with the front of the Doctor’s Bag, and it’s not symmetrical. Did I fail to follow the directions on the left or on the right, or is it just another example of how badly written the pattern is? Not sure yet), but also a good deal of work and meetings and stuff.
One of the things I spent a lot of time on yesterday was preparation for a meeting I have this morning right after I teach my writing class. I also spent a lot of time getting ready for the class, but that’s another story. I’m meeting with a new client, one of The Computer Guy’s clients.
I thoroughly analyzed the website. I got some people to test the navigation. I tried out all the possible paths. I went through her Analytics for the past year and checked the paths people generally took. I ran diagnostics on it. I was totally prepared.
This morning I was writing a post about this at my marketing blog and went over to the website to check an example.
It was completely different.
The Computer Guy, who apparently never sleeps at all, changed the whole thing overnight.
It’s vastly improved, of course. However, since he didn’t give me a heads up on that, I could very easily have walked into that meeting with my recommendations and been told, “Yep, we already did that.” Also, I have to go back over there now and re-analyze.
I’m confident that The Computer Guy didn’t do this to me on purpose. I’m representing his firm here, he’s the one who pays me, and there’s no reason for him to want to sabotage me with his client. No doubt he was preparing for the meeting himself and noticed the same things I did.
However, if for some reason you wanted to make some SEO professional of your acquaintance look incompetent in a meeting, this would be a good way to do it. I realize that few of my readers will have the opportunity, and fewer still would want to do this, but you can file it away for future reference. Maybe you’ll put it in a novel someday.