Web Design
A good web site portrays the look and feel of your business. It is, in effect, your shop front or foyer and should present a professional and cohesive look. The importance of web usability should not be overlooked as is often the case with flashy and interactive sites. (Hence, I do not work with sites written totally in Flash).
It is often part of a larger marketing and sales strategy and is used to establish brand and name awareness . This often means using company logos, colours and even particular fonts or styles.
A web site designer will work closely with you to help you achieve the most effective layout. This sometimes means changing the design to grab peoples attention when they first view a page thereby increasing viewer awareness and participation in the site.
A web site usually displays, as a minimum, a welcome page (home page), a contact page and a page about you or your business. (Although sometimes a single page design is used to establish a presence on the internet).
Further to this - if your company is offering a service your web site might include customer testimonials and a page showing what services or levels of service you offer.
If your company has a product or products to sell you may require that a potential customer can purchase these on-line (this is known as e-commerce).
Don't forget the importance of search engine optimization and once the web site is placed on the World Wide Web it is important that the web site is maintained and updated regularly so that returning customers don't see it as stagnant.
Web usability is often overlooked and web site designs end up flashy and dynamic, but to most users on the web these are a waste of time and as many as 80% of viewers will not return to your site if things take too long to load (not everyone has a fast broadband connection and about 10% of users still have dial-up) or there are annoying graphics or music. For this very reason I do not work with websites written totally in Flash.
How often have you gone to a website that has a Flash intro page and a link that says "Skip Intro" ? These are more often than not a complete waste of time - the first thing you do is click this link. Why bother with this page at all ? You will pay for a completely worthless page because a designer wants to use their latest 'toy'.
It is important to realise that when we look at a page on the web we don't read every single word, we scan the page looking for things that catch our attention such as links or headlines.
We also tend to expect things to be in a certain place (i.e. navigation, site ID, search buttons) and although convention might seem boring or dull we don't want to squander a visitor's patience or goodwill by placing things in odd places, they will just click away and probably never come back.
Once your site is listed in the major search engines, you want to get people to visit your site. The higher in the rankings, the more hits (visitors to your site) you are going to get.
This ranking is dependant on many factors ; the relevance of the page on your site to the search-term (i.e. the words that somebody types into the search box) , the number of links to that page from other websites and the number of links out of your page.
Looking purely at Google (the most widely used search engine) lets look at a few key points :
- As soon as a page is indexed by Google it obtains a page rank (this will be very small at first).
- A link on your page to another site (outgoing link) will increase the rank of the other page (not yours)
- A link coming to your page from a higher ranked page will increase your page rank (this will not lose the page rank of the origin page)
The most important factor as far as Google is concerned is the number of links coming to your page/site. This will come with time and by obtaining listings in other directories relevant to your business (some of these will be paid - some free).
The content of your site (i.e. the words and or pictures) are just as important because this is how the search-engines decide whether your site is relevant to the users search query. It is therefore wise to consider quite carefully the wording to go on each page of your site. Put yourself in the shoes of the potential customer/client and consider what search terms they might use to find your business.
The other major search engines work in a similar way although they may factor their calculations on ranking differently (i.e. place more emphasis on content).
The other important thing to consider is the page title (this is the part that is displayed at the top of each of the search results). This should be written to encourage people to click on your link - again think carefully about what you want to say here - you are limited to about 100 characters in length.
Lastly, think carefully about the design of the site - for instance sites written all in Flash will be very hard for search engines to rank / extract content. If you are using navigation buttons make sure there are ordinary text links for navigation to other pages of your site so that the search engines robots can index all of your pages.
