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 10 years. I was initially located in Stockport (near Manchester), in not so sunny England.
In 2002 I decided to relocate to Valencia (Spain) and I commenced to operate from there a couple of years ago. Although originally coming here, with the intent of retiring, I found myself frequently being asked by friends, and those introduced to me, to recommence web designing. There were two main reasons which promoted this idea.
Firstly
Although some of the Spanish web designers they had used, or approached, were technically very competent, often language problems were encountered. On occasions this applied even when the web designer said they "spoke" English. We have all experienced the difficulties that such problems can create - why give yourself unnecessary problems?. They found that by using myself this removed the potential for such misunderstanding.
Secondly
Several of my current clients had been introduced to "English web designers" who frankly I believe could stand charged with taking money under false pretences. Indeed we have one client who was actually stung twice, by different "English web designers" and had reached the point where they were unsure whether it was worth having a web site at all. The efforts that these "supposed" web designers produced neither business nor emails. One actually demanded additional payment for "work" he had not budgeted for in his quotation. I understand that he is still awaiting payment!
When I was asked to analyse their "old" web sites often I found that the composition was very amateurish (e.g.most had used frames which were popular in the early 1990s, but are now 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 their Client "automatically". These programs do not requiring the web designer to have any knowledge whatsoever of how to design a professional web site. My subsequent detailed analysis clearly demonstrated that no web page optimisation had been undertaken whatsoever and, as a direct consequence of that, the major search engines had not indexed their Client's web sites - making them invisible to those surfing the internet.
Such "automatic web design" programs are fine for an individual who requires an "instantly" visible web site for themselves, but are totally unsuitable for commercial purposes.
Another common fault that I discovered was that most of these web sites had often not been submitted to the major Search Engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN etc.) and the few that had been submitted, had not had their web pages optimised to enable high rankings to be obtained in those search engines.
For those of you that want 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.