An English professional web designer based in Valencia Spain
My name is Peter Woodall and I am the owner of Softcell Systems. I have been designing web sites professionally for over 15 years. I was initially located in Stockport (near Manchester), in a not so sunny England.
In 2002 I decided to relocate to Valencia (Spain) and re-commenced my web design business from Spain around three years ago. Although originally coming to Spain, with the intent of retiring, I found myself frequently being asked by friends, and those introduced to me, to "please design a web site for me (us)".
The two major reasons they say that lay behind their requests were :-.
Firstly
Although some of the Spanish web designers they had used, or approached, were technically very competent, often they encountered language problems. On occasions, this applied even when the Spanish web designer said they "spoke" English. We have all experienced the difficulties that such problems can create - why give yourself unnecessary problems if you don't need to? They found that by using myself this removed the potential for any such trauma and or misunderstanding.
Secondly
Several of my current clients, fearing the linguistic problems actively sought out "English web designers", based in Spain, some of whom could frankly have stood charged with taking money under false pretences. Indeed we have one client who was actually stung twice - by different "English web designers" and had then reached the point where they were unsure whether it was worthwhile them having a web site at all. The web sites that these "supposed" web designers created were frankly pathetic and produced neither any business nor emails for their Clients. One of them subsequently demanded additional payment, from them, for "work" he stated he had not budgeted for in his original quotation. I understand that he is still awaiting that additional payment!
When I was asked to analyse their "old" web sites, often I found the composition to be very amateurish (e.g. most had used frames which were popular in the early 1990s, but are nowadays virtually extinct). Why? Simply because framed based web sites are notoriously difficult to get the search engines to index. If the search engines cannot index your web site there is little point, if any, in having one.
I strongly suspect that the reason they used "frames", is probably that they had used certain web site programs, that supposedly design the ideal web site for a Client "automatically". These programs do not requiring the designer to have any knowledge whatsoever of how to design a professional web site. My subsequent detailed analysis further demonstrated that no web page optimisation had been undertaken whatsoever. As a direct consequence of that, the major search engines had not indexed their Client's web sites - making them totally invisible to any potential customers surfing the internet. There was absolutely no chance of any potential customers finding their web site.
Such "automatic web design" programs are intended for individuals who requires an "instantly" visible personal web site for themselves. They are however totally unsuitable for any commercial purpose.
Another common fault that I discovered was that most of these web sites had not even been submitted to the major Search Engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN etc.). The few that had been submitted, because they had not had their web pages optimised, could not achieve high rankings to be obtained in the various search engines.
For those of you that require a dual language web site, I can offer this facility (for English and Spanish) web sites, by the use a translator to ensure that all translated text is both accurate and meaningful to your target audience.