I have a prospect that wants me to create a new site for him using a PSD file (PhotoShop) as the design input.

I don’t have Photoshop so using the plug in is not an option for me.

It will probably take me longer than the going expert so charging by the hour is not a good idea. What is the going rate for a 5 page html site coded in divs and php using PSD as input?

@bob-green Why give your client a site with out of date technology? Use WordPress mad give your client a site that they can use for years.

Hi @bob-green

If I were you I would not try to sell the Wordpress platform to them. IF they asked for HTML, that is what you should deliver. 

WP is based on PHP & MySQL and is a (blogging) content management system (CMS) – not the same thing at all.

They may know that HTML is the easiest readable language to the search engines, everything else (other languages) are read and indexed as well, but HTML is very basic and some CMS systems are very heavy on the code side and don’t deliver as well as straight HTML (for search engine indexing).

Not all clients work blind – they may have done enough research to want HTML. If you have problems getting the coding done, give me a holler.

Eileen

Hi @bob-green

 
I’m not saying it is not good for SEO – I’m saying straight HTML is more easily understood by the search engines.

When you have ANY CMS you have heavier code – every single item in the code is read along with the information you want indexed. It CAN take longer for CMS websites to index. Wordpress is the easiest outside of HTML to be indexed IF you have your ducks in a row.  Wordpress does that well, better than the other CMS platforms.

However, if you have a client that has requested HTML, why would you deviate from that? 

If a client sends me a design in any format, I can duplicate that in HTML. I don’t use their file for any type of conversion – I simply design a website in HTML from their design. 

The problem has been (in the past) that designers use a platform that they understand (i.e. wordpress, drupal, joomla, etc.) that has an “admin panel” that the client can use. The client however may not (and almost all do not know) or understand the ins and outs of SEO, so even a website that looks like they want, can become un-serviceable to the client as the designer does not hang around to teach them or inform them how to use their keywords in content, tags, headers, page names, naming conventions, structure, etc. to accomplish having a website that will show well in the SERPs. 

Good SEO begins with the web developer and the developer should know enough to handle HTML – SEO built in – from the get go.

If you sell a blogging platform to a client, make sure they know what they are getting. Otherwise, you’ll have a very unhappy client, in the end.

One SEOmoz Guide states:“In order to be listed in the search engines, your most important content should be in HTML text format. Images, Flash files, Java applets, and other non-text content are often ignored or devalued by search engine spiders, despite advances in crawling technology. The easiest way to ensure that the words and phrases you display to your visitors are visible to search engines is to place it in the HTML text on the page.”

Eileen

@supereb @bob-green  Yes, it takes a little longer to pull data from a database when using dynamic code, but that shouldn’t make you not use dynamic content. I may have misunderstood the above about search engines taking longer to read PHP pages.  Google and Bing can not see PHP code or MYSQL code, so that is not indexed. An HTML page is static and static pages grow, well, static. Google likes updated content. Updating your content is good. It isn’t super easy for people buying HTML pages to update their content as it is with a system like WordPress.

I am not saying not to make HTML pages or to use WordPress, I am just saying static pages usually stay very static and don’t get updated. You should read this page on static vs dynamic pages from the Google Web Master blog, even though it is quite dated. This was written in 2008, so back then they did recommend keeping your most important information in html pages. I am not sure if that is something they still stick by.  Here is the link http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls.html. It took me awhile to get this post to reflect what I was thinking, so older versions didn’t say what I was trying to say.   

Hi again @planetzuda

Aahhh – this might be what you were looking for about the URL’s —
Configuring URL Parameters in Webmaster Tools

Or I may be all wet on that.  
Eileen