Website design credits - Poll
Recently, and I don’t know why it didn’t click earlier, but I’ve been noticing a lot of website design credits in footers of websites, ie. Website Design by Freelance Matt. To me this seems a little strange as you’ve hired a builder to build you something, when you get a house built you don’t have a permanent ‘This house built by Bob The Builder’ out the front do you? So why do we have it in websites?
From my reckoning there are two reasons why this happens;
Free Advertising - Pop a link in there and forever, or until client decides to get a new website built, you’ve got a free advertisement and you probably made a reasonable sum on the design process itself.
and
Link Juice - Assuming the website designer you’ve chosen has built a number of sites before, and popped links in those ones, chances are his / her website outranks yours and by putting these links in he / she continues to build on their ‘authority’ and you might get a little flow on benefit from having a higher ranking site linking to you.
This version isn’t an entirely bad thing as you’ll inherit a little bit of link juice from the designer which will help a little with your overall SEO strategy.
Now while the ‘link juice’ method sounds alright, most of the time it also gives the designer free advertising which is kind of sucky in my opinion. What designers could do to overcome this however is to set that particular footer text to blend in the background of the footer by using the same colour as the footer. You both get the link juice benefit, and he / she doesn’t get the free advertising….at least not as blatantly.
What are your thoughts on this, vote in the poll and / or leave me a comment.
Big Cartel, all your art and cool merch
Pretty well the most awesome ‘collective’ I’ve ever seen, Big Cartel is a community of artists, photographers, fashion designers and all sorts of other indie cool kids to sell their various wares. There’s a few thousand stores on the site, some are cool others aren’t really my bag, but I figured I’d run through and give you a bit of a cool list, so read on..
Foldskool Heroes by Marshall Alexander
I love paper toys, so when I saw these guys what was I to do but to print them out, cut ‘em up and start folding.
I’ll post photos of mine later on, but if you want to get these little guys for yourselves then head over to Marshall Alexander’s website and download ‘em. He’s also got a bunch of photos on his flickr of various other paper toys he’s made.
Find me here