P.S.

I spent about five weeks developing a website for Preventable Surprises using a platform called Weebly. The head of P.S., Raj, didn’t like my prototype site. I’m not offended by this b/c I’m not and never have claimed to be a web designer.

He hired a web designer who created a very flashy site on another platform, WordPress. I’m generally anti-flashy for an organisation that is about making a case to institutional investors about systemic risk in financial markets. Whatever.

Raj then wanted me to improve the readability score for each page and the search engine optimisation score. So I would look for red dots in an analytics box and try to change them to orange or green. Here are readability red dots for one page (there are 120 pages on the new site):
*The text does not contain any subheadings. Add at least one subheading.
*The copy scores 29.6 in the Flesch Reading Ease test, which is considered very difficult to read. Try to make shorter sentences, using fewer difficult words to improve readability.
*50% of the sentences contain more than 20 words, which is more than the recommended maximum of 25%. Try to shorten the sentences.
*18.8% of the sentences contain passive voice, which is more than the recommended maximum of 10%. Try to use their active counterparts.

Any writers out there know how much respect I would have for this cookie cutter nonsense. Below are the search engine scores:
*No focus keyword was set for this page. If you do not set a focus keyword, no score can be calculated.
*No meta description has been specified. Search engines will display copy from the page instead.
*No images appear in this page. Consider adding some as appropriate.
*No links appear in this page, consider adding some as appropriate.
*The page title is too short. Use the space to add keyword variations or create compelling call-to-action copy.
*The text contains 268 words. This is slightly below the recommended minimum of 300 words. Add a bit more copy.

I spent two days creating keywords, metatags, and inserting the keywords everywhere I could. Then I decided this whole effort is BS and successfully argued that I should be editing the web content based on making convincing, clear arguments, not based on the f’ing Flesch test. So I’ve spent a few days editing, only to have Raj unedit much of what I edit. So my time with PS needs to come to a close. Which means finding the time and energy for a job search. Job searches are so unpleasant that your current job has to be come even more unpleasant to get going. So SEO scores have their uses.
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