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Best prices best quality. Please contact me. 4 stages of web site design However, in the rush to have the "coolest" site design, web site owners forget whom they are designing their site for: their target audience. Your audience might find that Flash movie irritating after viewing it multiple times. Your audience might not be able to find your site in the search engines. "Bells and whistles" are attributes of a web site that need to be measured and tested to see if they increase or drive away sales. Below are the various stages of evolution web sites typically undergo: Stage 1 - Style Over Substance -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Stage 1 - Style Over Substance
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Stage 2 - Designing for Online Visibility Unfortunately, many web site owners fall for a doorway page company's pitch because the beautifully designed site couldn't possibly be the problem with low site traffic. Yahoo might have rejected a site, or the site might have been listed in Yahoo and the company cannot understand why they have no description next to their company name. But in no way would many ad agencies or doorway page companies want to tell potential clients the truth -- they simply did not design and write an effective web site -- because it would mean losing thousands of dollars in business.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Stage 3 - Designing for Your Audience Typically, web site owners will bring in a usability expert to analyze potential problems and present various solutions. Bringing in a search engine marketing expert to help with search-engine friendly design templates early in the design phase can save a company thousands of dollars in online marketing costs.
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-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Conclusion Understanding the products/services/information your target audience is searching for is paramount to designing and maintaining an effective web site. When you launch a site, you might have to make an educated guess as to what your target audience wants. After that, tools such as site statistics software and reporting from site searches tell you exactly what your visitors are looking for. Then content and marketing strategies can be adjusted accordingly. Unless the advanced technology clearly benefits end users, do not use it on your site. If your venture capitalists or CEOs or lawyers like the site, ask if they are going to spend the thousands or millions of dollars to keep you in business. They're not. Your target audience who will ultimately determine the success or failure of your site. Your web site should be easy to read You also don't want to set your text size too small (hard to read) or too large (it will appear to shout at your visitors). All capitalized letters give the appearance of shouting at your visitors. Keep the alignment of your main text to the left, not centered. Center-aligned text is best used in headlines. You want your visitors to be comfortable with what they are reading, and most text (in the West) is left aligned. Read details on how to make your web site and web graphic images easy to read.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Your web site should be easy to navigate Link colors in your text should be familiar to your visitor (blue text usually indicates an unvisited link and purple or maroon text usually indicates a visited link), if possible. If you elect not to use the default colors, your text links should be emphasized in some other way (boldfaced, a larger font size, set between small vertical lines, or a combination of these). Text links should be unique -- they should not look the same as any other text in your web pages. You do not want people clicking on your headings because they think the headings are links. Your visitors should be able to find what they are looking for in your site within three clicks. If not, they are very likely to click off your site as quickly as they clicked on.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Your web site should be easy to find Web sites are promoted online via search engines, directories, award sites, banner advertising, electronic magazines (e-zines) and links from other web sites. If you are not familiar with any of these online terms, then it is best that you have your site promoted by an online marketing professional. (See our section, What to Look for in an Online Marketing Company, for some general guidelines.) Web sites are promoted offline via the conventional advertising methods: print ads, radio, television, brochures, word-of-mouth, etc. Once you have created a web site, all of your company's printed materials including business cards, letterhead, envelopes, invoices, etc. should have your URL printed on them. Not only should your web site be easy to find, but your contact information should be easy to find. People like to know that there is a person at the other end of a web site who can help them in the event that: they need answers to questions which are not readily available on your web site; some element on your site is not working and end users need to be able to tell you about it, and directory editors need you to modify parts of your site to be sure that your site is placed in the most relevant category.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Your web page layout and design should be consistent throughout the site For example, if you use a drop shadow as a special effect in your bullet points, you should use drop shadows in all of your bullets. Link-colors should be consistent throughout your web pages. Typefaces and background colors, too, should remain the same throughout your site. Color-coded web pages, in particular, need this consistency. Typefaces, alignment in the main text and the headings, background effects, and the special effects on graphics should remain the same. Only the colors should change. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Your web site should be quick to download A good application of this rule is adding animation to your site. Sure, animation looks "cool" and does initially catch your eye, but animation graphics tend to be large files. Test the download time of your pages first. If the download time of your page is relatively short and the addition of animation does not unreasonably increase the download time of your page, then and ONLY then should animation be a consideration. Finally, before you consider the personal preferences of your web page design, you should consider all of the above rules FIRST and adapt your personal preferences accordingly. The attitude "I don't like how it looks" should always be secondary to your web site's function. Which is more important: creative expression/corporate image or running a successful business?
home > design tips > web site design > search engines Designing sites for search engines and directories Search engines and directories vary in the way they rank your web site in a search query. Some search engines place primary emphasis on the text within your title tags. Some search engines place emphasis on the main ideas presented in all of your text on a single web page. Some directories emphasize the text you submitted in their "Description" field. How and where you place your text, both in the copy your visitors see and within the HTML tags your visitors do not see, will affect your ranking. Keyword selection -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Keyword selection Look at your company's printed materials. What words do you use over and over? When you speak to new and current customers on the phone, what questions do they frequently ask and what words do they use? Ask your current customers how they would find you on the Internet. Then go to the major search engines and directories. Type in the keywords you want to use. Study the source code of the web sites that appeared in the top 20. Look at how your competitors ranked in a search query. Adjust your keyword selection accordingly.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Keyword placement For optimum search engine positions, your keywords need to appear at the top of your web pages. Thus, before you design your web page, ask yourself if you (or your web designer) have strategically placed your keywords within your title tags, meta-tags, headings, graphic images, and the first paragraph within your body tag. If not, you might need to rethink your site design.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Keyword frequency Also, some search engines ignore meta-tags. Thus, if you have included your keywords in your meta-tags but have not placed them elsewhere, you have missed a huge target audience, namely AOL users. Sites with frames have problems being indexed well because there is little opportunity otherwise to include additional text with keywords. Very, very few web sites can get in the Top 10 of all the major search engines (AltaVista, FAST Search, HotBot, Google, Lycos, Teoma) without spamming. We cannot emphasize this enough: if you hire anyone (a submission service, an individual, an online promotion service, etc.) to do the services we just described, they need to have both HTML and design experience, online marketing, and excellent copywriting skills. You do not want your web site to be permanently banned from a search engine or directory due to ignorance or lack of experience. Furthermore, submission services usually do just that: submit. Many do not perform keyword research, the HTML coding, and copywriting necessary to get a site optimally placed within the search engines. Ask a lot of questions before handing over any money.
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-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Site statistics Hopefully, because you have been thoughtful enough to give potential customers a reason to return to your site again and again, people will bookmark your site, and your web statistics will show an increase in a "No Referrer" category under referral URLs. Your site reports should show you where your potential customers are coming from (i.e. which search engine or directory they used to find you) and which keywords they used to find you. After your site has listed in the search engines and directories for a few months, review your site statistics and determine where the majority of your traffic comes from. Then focus your advertising efforts on those directories and search engines. You get better sales from targeted marketing than from spreading your net too wide. One client did exactly what we recommended, from keyword selection to monitoring site statistics. They found most of their sites referral traffic came from Yahoo queries. They bought banner space from Yahoo for two months. Whenever two of their keywords were typed in a search query, their banner would appear. Their traffic increased over 500%, and their sales reached five figures per month. Lastly, the saying "Content is King" still rings true. You can increase traffic to your web site, but if (1) people do not like what they see, (2) you do not offer potential customers what they want to buy, or (3) you do not give customers incentive to stay and/or bookmark your site, they will click off of your web site as quickly as they clicked on to it. home > design tips > web site design > graphic image HTML HTML code for graphic images Here is a sample of the HTML code for a dollar sign web graphic image: <IMG SRC="images/dollar.gif" WIDTH="31" HEIGHT="44" ALT="Dollar sign" VSPACE="2" HSPACE="2" BORDER="0"> Here is the dollar sign web graphic:
IMG: This is the HTML coding that tells the browser (Netscape or Explorer) to insert a graphic image into a web page SRC: This is the attribute that indicates which file name or URL of the graphic image you want to place on the web page. In this example, the image name is a GIF called dollar.gif, which is stored in the directory called images on our web site. The file name or URL must be enclosed in quotation marks. (Note: The names of graphic images are case sensitive. Thus, the graphic image named dollar.gif is not the same as the graphic image named dollar.GIF. You can use this little fact to quiz graphic designers to see if they are web-savvy.) ALT: Stands for the alternative text attribute. Alternative text must also be enclosed in quotation marks. In the event that your visitors want to view text (by turning off the "Auto Load Images" option in their browser) to increase a site's download time, in the place of the graphic image will appear the alternative text. The same text will appear if your visitors are using a text-only browser. This attribute is often overlooked by online promotion specialists. Some search engines index alternative text, thus making your graphic images another place to strategically place keywords. Also, if you are using Explorer as your browser, when you position your cursor over a graphic image, Explorer will display the alt-attribute message in a little box next to the cursor (similar to pop-ups). This gives you an opportunity to add to the delivery of your site's marketing message. BORDER: Newbies commonly overlook this attribute. If you are using your graphic image to link to another web page, such as a navigational button, you should set the BORDER to equal zero or else your browser will wrap a border around your image. The color of the border will be the same colors used in your text hyperlinks. For example, here is the same graphic image with the BORDER attribute removed. The first dollar sign image on this web page is also set to link to our tips page, but the BORDER attribute is set to zero. You can tell if a graphic image is a hyperlink if you put your cursor over the image and look at the bottom of your browser's screen. If the graphic image is linked to another web page, the URL will appear at the bottom of your browser's screen. HSPACE / VSPACE: This attribute sets the horizontal (left and right) and vertical (top and bottom) spacing around a graphic image. This attribute is particularly useful if you do not want your text to be flush against the graphic image. (Note: Some people format their sites using tables and will set the spacing around their graphic images using the CELLPADDING and CELLSPACING attributes in their tables. Thus, this attribute is optional.)
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