Euro RSCG and GSD&M Bill the Airforce $850,000 for Web Design
December 15, 2008
We can’t believe what we are reading, the US Air force has paid $850,000 for a website redesign. Euro RSCG and GSD&M raked in a bunch of tax payer money, for a site that technically violates Google Guidelines and shows up almost as a blank page in Google’s text cache:
Here is Google’s Guidelines on the matter:
Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.
To make matters worse the site doesn’t even have any keywords on the main page to help recruit individuals, not even the word “careers” or “jobs” or even “help wanted” is listed on the main page. But they are running a free ad for Adobe.
“You must have Javascript enabled and Flash 9.0 or above to get the full experience of Airforce.com” that hyperlinks directly to the company.
Here is the Official Air Force Press Release.
Initially attracting approximately 22,000 visitors each month in its first year, the Web site now draws more than a half million visitors a day, who view more than four million pages within the site. Redesigned by Euro RSCG through the Air Force’s contract ad agency, GSD&M Idea City of Austin, Texas, at a cost of $850,000, recruiting officials anticipate the site will continue to attract visitors and recruiting leads.
The official start date from the Press Release has stated this is the new version of the website:
“Recruiting Service officials launched their redesigned Web site Dec. 15 at airforce.com. ”
Your Tax Dollars at work. Euro RSCG and GSD&M, you should be ashamed of yourself.
The chances are the site will not rank for many of the terms that would help the Air Force’s recruiting efforts in Google, forcing Taxpayers to foot an expensive Adwords campaign to recruit individuals looking for a career
The problem we have is that the Airforce.Com website is perfectly capable for ranking for keywords that will lead to recruitment, in other words the Air Force site should be ranking for these terms organically, but won’t due to lack of SEO skill set built into the website..
There are literally 500 ways to improve the site and honestly both firms need to pony it up and hire a responsible SEO firm, every moment you are waiting on this your client, and the American Taxpayers are losing.
They already lost nearly a million dollars on this, they don’t need to spend millions more on an ad words campaign. This is so embarrassing, taxpayers as a whole should be outraged at nearly a million dollar development job that normally goes for a fraction of that cost, and then the marketing website is built without any of the marketing aspects that search engine optimization requires.
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15 Responses to “Euro RSCG and GSD&M Bill the Airforce $850,000 for Web Design”
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so i went to google, typed in “air force job” and this was the second site on the natural search results. I don’t see what your fuss is all about?
Wow nice budget, but not really surprised.
The Flash is well done and it’s an interesting experience. It will be interesting to see how the site does for non-branded keywords like “military jobs.”
lieslieslies - how about search for “military careers” and not “air force job” .. because air force job has the freaking word air force in it.. If you don’t see the fuss… then you have no business working in this field.
did you ever do a link command on this site? It has like a gagillion link backs. The Airforce is trying to sell themselves to recruits not search engines. TV commercials, magazines, billboards ya die da da is going to get these killas new recruits not a Google search result. Bamo!
LOL!! That is exactly my point Joe… with a gagillion backlinks, it should rank for the word “jobs” by itself…. but alas.. they don’t even have the fracking word on the site.
I guess you could call these clowns an “Airforce of One” that is..1 keyword
oh i forgot…. BAMO!
Why would the airforce want to spend time and effort interviewing someone who types “job” into google? This is not a mcJob!!! Maybe they aren’t interested in speaking to people who don’t actually want to work there and have the commonsense to type http://www.airforce.com into their browser!
The site looks great, actually. The press release said that other advertising avenues drive traffic to the airforce.com, which includes those they’re targeting. And it’s quite a bit of content, lets see Ford or Sony try to redesign their website for less than $1 million — it’s not going to happen, and it’s a heck of a lot cheaper than all of the television advertising I see from the Army.
I don’t know how you can say that Patrick… It took nearly 3 minutes to load on a Cable Modem… most people aren’t gonna wait that long.
sounds like an issue with your service provider
Actually.. it’s a problem with the site… as it appears the complaints are widespread.. there are a few complaints on adscam about it.
Founder, you can’t stream porn and expect to load the Airforce’s site. Quit choking da chicken!
Founder, the site just launched a day ago… Give it some time to be crawled, man!
All of the content is hybrid built; if you disable flash, javascript, plugins, styles, everything, all of the pertinent content is perfectly front-and-center. The only major complaint you could have (if you knew what you were talking about) is the in-line javascript. And while I agree the homepage is quite excessive, it is surprisingly beautiful. There is a good deal of content and, let’s remember, people that are considering the military are typically pretty poor or uneducated and need eye candy to retain attention or excitement.
Considering the source — Come on, Euro and GSDM??? — this is a PHENOMENAL execution. Now, was it worth $1m? NO WAY. But that’s less than $200/soldier’s life taken in Iraq. Was that worth it?
Also, I am pretty anti-military and completely unrelated to the agencies involved, so don’t try to skew these comments as bias.
Well, can’t speak on the technical aspects of the site. But what did you expect, especially when you view the websites for Euro RSCG and GSD&M? It’s crazy that an assignment for a website was entrusted to agencies with shitty websites.