How does one begin to respond to this?

Written by: Jonathan Briggs

September 25, 2009 [3117 views]

Below is a copy of an email received by the OTHER media as a request for a quote. We receive many such requests but this one was unusually terrible. I have made no changes to the wording or the spelling only omitted the name of the site (to avoid giving him any attention).

Subject: Estimate.

Hi.
I'm gathering some quotes and general feedback on my new website, please take the time to read the following unfortunately long winded email, and get back to me with some prices (please don't ask what my budget is, I'd like to know the best price you can do it for, thanks)

I already have a website, at [removed the address to avoid libel]. As you can see it serves a purpose, but is very cheaply made (probably on some kind of template) and so completely unsuitable for SEO, and also needs a few tweaks to make it better to navigate and increase enquiries.

Based on that please can you give me a rough estimate for the following website:

The design will be very similar to my current website, so not much to do there aesthetically, although I'm going to change some of the wording etc to make it simpler in places and more attractive. Make more of the 'spins' section, and generally use nice big shiny buttons and more modern looking type. I realise you have to change it a certain amount in order not to encroach on the creativity of my previous designer, but the original designs were done mostly by me on paper anyway.

Roughly the same amount of pages (including a contact form), although potentially 2 or 3 sub categories in the packshot section.

I want it to load up FAST.

I am INTERESTED in having, depending on how much extra it costs, a client area (I don't know if/how this differs from FTP), where my customers can log in and download their images (up to around 400MB) and I can also use this to up sell. I would like to be able to offer certain clients certain deals when they log in to get their images. Other than this, I don't think my site really needs to be content managed (?), other than swapping a few pictures every two or three months, and I'm hoping you'll do this for free :) I'm only considering this feature at the moment, and would like to know both your thoughts and how much it would cost with and without.

SEO is obviously important, if you don't offer it, thats OK, I'm happy to out-source SEO to an expert, but they will need access to the server, I think. If you do, finding someone who only charges based on results and/or can show me examples of sites they have on Google page 1, is a big bonus for me, and I'm happy to pay a bit extra to be on page 1 of Google than to pay less to someone else and be on page 8. I have, also, got one over riding keyword that I want to get high for, 'product photographer', and six or seven lesser ones, rather than twenty or thirty general phrases.

At the risk of sounding like I'm telling you how to do your job, here's what I've been told to look out for: 'search engine friendly urls eg www.domain.com/name-of-product-or-keyphrase.html not www.domain.com/sessionid=?1244 etc-, each page is a page in it's own right (not framed - eachpage should have it's own url)- title and meta description tags can be changed on every page - so eac page can have different tags, not same for every one- compliant coding / html- XML sitemap that is updated regularly- keyphrase friendly copy - not all flash- not all images - every page should have at leat 200-300 words on it - even if it's just a escription of a shoot - needs to be easily updatable and expandable - Also make sure they 301 redirect any pages you have now that won't exist anymore... Do you do any/all of these?
I'm not sure I'm keen on having '200-300 words on each page', I hate wordy sites, especially photographers ones, I wanna keep it light and slcik and not too wordy. So maybe there's a way to disguise any long paragraphs of wording that helps SEO, or just not do it.

Lastly, before we get underway with any work, I would like to be able to meet you quickly face to face to discuss ideas, and get some feed back on my brief for my new site.

I very much look forward to hearing from you and getting this moving ASAP,

Thanks
[Name removed]

P.S.
************PLEASE DO NOT PHONE ME************PLEASE DO NOT PHONE ME***********PLEASE DO NOT PHONE ME***********PLEASE DO NOT PHONE ME***********PLEASE DO NOT

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