Before Makeover

On the surface, this project might seem to be challenge free. The client, Massachusetts General Hospital, has their own web design department and grap[hic artists. They had already developed a look and feel for their front page and all we had to do was implement it in HTML/RTML on the Yahoo! Store platform.
      The fact is that far from simplifying design, implementing a graphic artist's vision almost makes delivering a top-notch Web site FAR more difficult. To begin with, good design practice for the web demands that the design fit the user's screen. Graphic artists are used to an environment where the size of the paper their design will be printed on is the one thing that's a constant. Web browsers, on the other hand, range from 800 x 600 pixels to 2000 x 1200 pixels. Graphic artists typically assume that their screen is everybody's screen and whatever fits nicely on their computer will fit everybody's computer.
      Graphic artists typically are entirely clueless about SEO. Not having any idea what the acronym means or how it is accomplished, they routinely render most or all the text on a design using a graphics program. They pick beautiful cursive fonts not understanding that such fonts will require image-rendered text since most of the users' computers won't have those fonts installed and will not be able to render them from ASCII text. Problem with this is that search engine spiders only read ASCII text. Spiders are incapable of reading text rendered in an image. So text in images is invisible to the search engine. When an entire page is rendered as text, it might as well be a blank sheet of paper as far as a search engine spider is concerned
      Read about how we addressed these design decisions.
 

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