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Web site design foundations
Written By: Keith Jardine
What good is it having a website if no one ever visits due to not being found in any search engines? At the end of the day you have a website for the purpose of selling, either your services or your products. Too many web designers seem to forget this primary objective.
A good website should look good be easy to navigate, and most importantly have concise content:
1. Design
Design is an important part of your site if the Design is wrong or the site lacks consistency your prospectors will leave in their thousands, depending on the client the Design should reflect the professionalism of their business, a good way to maintain consistency is using cascading style sheets (CSS) and templates.
2. Navigation
Prospectors want to be able to find the information or product quickly and easily, avoid complicated navigation systems instead stick to tried and tested navigation, all the top ten blue chip companies in the world tend to follow a similar style of navigation, if there is a lot of content on the website include a site map, or a quick search feature. The best place for secondary navigation is actually on the right hand side of the website (this is because when people read they rest there eyes momentarily at the end of the line before going on to the next line, and if it were a book the paragraph normally ends at the right hand side of the page).
3. Content
If there is too much content then the prospective visitor is put off, to little content and the prospector will look elsewhere. Another important issue concerned with content is, don’t lock it away using either Macromedia Flash, or an image, because search engine crawlers (spiders and crawlers are pretty basic mostly created using Java which can only read code,) will only see the file and not the content contained.
Finally to conclude there are many other things you can do to improve your Web Sites performance in the search engines, but unless you start with a solid foundation then all the work you do will be to no avail. Remember when you build a house you start with solid foundations and you build up to the roof, but with out foundations your house will collapse.
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