If you’re doing it right, your goal is never to build an SEO-friendly site. It’s to build a usable site. The latter leads to the former. Not the other way around.

This isn’t to say SEO doesn’t work. It’s only to say SEO is a hack.

I could be wrong, but it seems like a number of the web pros I watch have implemented some manner of awesome-only rule. They build like five or six awesome sites a year — the kind they’d use regardless of whether they were being paid to build them — and they block everything else.

I mean, sure, it’s possible they’re not talking about their less inspiring work, but I prefer my first suggestion, the awesome-only rule. I just like to think it exists.

My question though, is whether it works. We’ve never applied such a rule to organizations. We have no qualms turning away work we can’t get excited about, but I’d say the business success of each relationship has more to do with individual personalities than it does with the client’s brand. Sometimes we build things that don’t afford us bragging rights.

It all makes for strange questions when writing case studies or selecting work for portfolios. E.g., what impression do you give by loading a portfolio a certain way? Do you turn away good work?

These are the questions that sometimes fill my head. Also, our own case studies and portfolio are more a condition of procrastination than of these questions.