The revenge of Bob the Builder

As I’m doing the interface for Rapidsite 3, I try to keep Bob the Builder in my head ( I have a 3 year old lad, so this is not hard) . Bob is my theoretical site owner, the name is not meant to be derogatory, but more just a familiar place holder for so many hard working small business people. My family all work in their own various small business so the time constraints and pressures are familiar to me.

Bob as I see him, just wants a site that works. He is not interested in how or why or what’s hip this month in web design. He just wants a way to display his business to a wider audience via a very cost effective medium. He may never touch the site after it is up, but hopefully he may be tempted bit by bit to tweak certain elements. One of the things working at UfindUs has taught me is that most people who have a website, don’t actually want to do a lot with it. It’s just a contact point for their customers and potential clients, and an on-line brochure for their products and services.

This is actualy a bit of a shame. We have a new search engine specialist here called Adrian Berry who looks after getting our customers sites to soar up the rankings of people like Google and Yahoo. Now what’s been interesting is how impressed he’s been with how well our current Rapidsites do on search engines. Because of how long Ufindus has been going (over two years – this is a long time in the web world), and the number of links both into and out of the directory, we count as a bit of a heavy weight site to the search engines. Which means our Rapidsites which get links from us get a share of that weighting (it’s a bit like having a glamorous older sibling).

What is really interesting talking to Adrian is the ideas we’re coming up with to try and make the new Rapidsites perform even better than this. We’ve got a few ideas but more on this later.