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What to look for in a good web
design Features of Good Web Design I mostly work with small businesses, often one's just starting up. Whenever I'm creating a web site in an industry that I'm not familiar with, I scour the web looking to see how high the bar is raised in terms of content and a professional image. Fortunately for most of my clients, the bar is set pretty low for a couple reasons: First, it seems that many small businesses don't invest in quality work (they might have a relative who offered to do a free site so why spend the $$?) or they hire someone that might do some things well but other areas are lacking. And since most business owners know little or nothing about website design, they are at the mercy of those that say they do!
A professional image is obviously important when attracting customers, but there's another big benefit derived from having one. Other businesses often search the web looking for co-marketing opportunities. Perhaps your company books safaris, and an owner of a travel agency saw your site on the web, was impressed by the professional image, and contacted you to see about booking clients through you. If your company looks "corporate" as opposed to "mom-and-pop", others will be attracted to you. Your "successful" looking image will help drive business toward you. Now, that doesn't mean you create a site that misrepresents your abilities, but rather, a polished attractive site will create a level of confidence in your prospects that your company is going places. Reasonable Download Times Slow downloading web sites annoy visitors who more than likely will move onto to someone else's site. The obvious reason is that large file sizes take longer to download. Some culprits are your photos and your graphics. But a web site that only contains text would download in a instant but to the detriment of your professional image. So a good graphics program like Xara X or Photoshop is needed to help you greatly reduce the size of your photos and graphic files. If large graphics are still desired for your site, then they should be "sliced" into smaller pieces so that the visitor starts to see parts of the page quickly, hopefully deciding to wait for the full page to load. But another factor in download times is your webhosting service. Be wary of using free hosting as the servers may be slower. They also add banner ads or popups to your site that all take time to be downloaded. With high quality webhosting prices being so low, free web hosting simply isn't worth the savings of just a few bucks a month. Spend the money and look for Linux based servers and they are more stable and less prone to virus attacks. Easy To Use, Easy to Update Navigation Bars Navbars help visitors find what they're looking for. They should be logically organized in well named categories. An extra touch would be to include a "site map" link and even a "search" box to insure visitors have the very best opportunity to find all of your pages. The look of the navbar shouldn't overpower the rest of the website, rather most sites only need simple color matched buttons like the ones on this page. Another important user of the navigation system of a site is the search engine. It's paramount that the search can "spider" your entire site, otherwise only your home page may be indexed. Among other things, the more related pages that you can show the search engines, the more important your site will look to it and the better you should rank. Also, the home page probably is written in more general terms, where other pages deeper in your site are more narrowly focused. Those pages often are the ones that rank best and serve as a gateway into your site. So again, making sure that the search engines can "see" then in your navigation system is critical. Search engines often have difficulty following the links in a Javascript coded menubar like the one above so you'll always see professional sites include simple HTML links to other key pages or a link to the "site map". The site map is a catalog of all of the website's pages and uses simple HTML links that the search engines can use to "spider" the site. Finally, a third user of your navbar system is your webmaster. The person who takes care of your site and builds your pages needs a navbar that is easily updated. That's important for two reasons....time and money. The navbar on this page literally takes me less than a minute to update with new pages. If you're paying a web designer to build your website, this is a big money saver! But if the navbar buttons were custom made without the use of powerful software, then you'll be reluctant to add pages due to the hassle and the cost. That can cause you to lose interest in it as a marketing tool. Optimized Photos and Graphics As described before, optimized photos and graphics can make or break a site. With some exceptions, you should save your photos as JPEG's and your other graphics as GIF's. Save as JPEG's, photos are easy to compress in terms of file size if you have software that will do it. These programs let you see what your picture will look like as you vary the amount of compression before your save your work. The idea is to compress it the most while still preserving clarity. A small picture might only compress to 75% or so until clarity is lost while large photos (e.g., 800x600) might still be clear compressed to 30% or less of its original file size. A photo can be saved as a 256 color GIF but the file size normally will be significantly bigger than when saving as a JPEG. That's why photos are normally always saved as JPEG's. But if your photo is small, with many similar colors, and if there are graphics or text saved in the same image, you'll get better results using the GIF format. When graphics and text images are saved as JPEG's, they lose clarity and sharpness unless unless minimally compressed. While JPEG's "blend" the image and colors to produce a life-like "photographic" image, GIF's preserve sharp lines while using a limited number of colors. To reduce the file sizes of GIF images, saving it using 16 colors vs 256 colors helps greatly. A 4 color design is even better for file size, but then you may lose the custom look of a logo or other graphic used in the website. But with good graphics software, you'll be able to compare the effect of reducing the number of colors before you save your graphic. And, of course, if you reduce the actual size of the photo or graphic, that saves space and provides greatly reduced download times. The key is to find the right balance between clear and interesting photos and graphics that give your site a polished look, while ensuring that dial up users aren't turned off by slow download times. Well Written Content Content should be written not only for the visitor, but also for the search engines. Everyone knows that search engines figure out the theme of a site by the related words in the text and metatags, but often it's challenging to write in a way that is both attractive to the search engines and the human visitors. One way to check is to read your content out loud after you have added as many rich keywords as possible. If when reading it out loud, it still sounds like good English, you're good to go! Matching Metatags Once your content is inserted into the page, now it's time to write your metatags. Metatags are visible to the search engines, but not to your visitors. They help the search engines decide what the theme of your site is. The search engines want to see a good match between the visible content and "hidden" metatags so that they know you aren't trying to trick them. The purpose of the search engine is to provide the web surfer with the most accurate "results" for the search words entered. Someone searching for a "florist" doesn't want to find a car dealer so the search engines have secret formulas in order to automatically decide what category your site belongs in and how high to rank it. Writing your metatags is fairly simple. For example, your "keywords" metatag should include all of the visible words on your page that relate to the theme of your site. The "description" metatag should provide a two or three sentence overview of the page. The "title" metatag should describe the page in even less words but be very keyword rich. While it takes considerable time for a larger site, custom metatags on each page can really boost your search engine rankings for your site. In the search engine results of Google, MSN, and others, the links are actually the "Title" metatag of the website. The keywords you entered are highlighted in bold in the results. That shows how important the "Title" tag is! Attention to Detail One important key to a polished and professional site is your attention to details. In many sites you'll see text "touching" the edge of photos, which is unnecessary since good web software let's the designer control the space around a photo or graphic. Correcting typos is also very important for obvious reasons. One way that I control the placement of photos and graphics is to limit the width of the site to about 750 pixels, plus or minus. Many sites you see will stretch across the width of the browser window, but when I have photos and graphics scattered throughout the text, I limit the width. For ecommerce sites where there might be one photo per product page, it looks fine if the page fills the browser. But a page with photos and graphics spread throughout, and with the text stretched across a page, the results can look pretty bad and it's completely avoidable. If you do design a page with a fixed pixel width, make sure it less that 800 pixels wide so that visitors using a screen resolution of 800 x 600 will be able to view your site without scrolling left and right. Animation and Pop Ups Animation Pop Ups have their place, but most sites don't need it, or at least not to the degree you see it sometimes. Used to excess they can be very distracting, annoying, and unprofessional looking. Pop Ups in particular are troublesome as they usually are in front of what you really want to see and you have to close them each time. If you're looking for visitors to come back to your site time and time again, don't annoy or bore them with the same animations, movies, and pop ups that will send them elsewhere. Links Page A good web site is one that ranks well with the search engines. Most visitors will find what they need with the search engines, so if yours is invisible to them, there's little benefit to having a site at all. In addition to having a good navigation system, well written content, and custom metatags, your site needs to be linked to as many other sites in your field as possible. If a lot of sites are linking to your website, that tells the search engines that your site is "important" to the world wide web and it helps your search engine rankings. There are services and software that help with this task immensely, but it's a big job and one that will be ongoing during the life of your website. By having links, especially to your competitors, you may think that you're helping the competition if some of your visitors leave your site, but in the end, your rankings will be better, bringing more visitors than you would've had otherwise. You can make sure your visitors don't lose your site if they click on one of the links by programming the linked website to open in a new browser window. That way your site is still there and hasn't been replaced by your competitor. Information Pages Let's say you're a real estate agent, and you want to build a site describing your service and the properties you have available. If you'd really like to appeal to the search engines, and thereby obtain more visitors, periodically write articles about what you know best, buying and selling real estate. Your webmaster can easily build these pages as they don't involve much more that cutting-and-pasting your content into the template, adding the page to the menubar, and writing the custom metatags. Search engines love these pages since the Information Age and the Internet are all about information. Suppose you write an article about how to sell a house - make it keyword rich and post it to your site. The search engines will see a narrowly focused page and much of your future traffic may in fact enter your site through that page and not your home page. Write different articles about very specific topics and you'll begin to rank better for the keywords and phrases in that article. I call that "casting a bigger net" when you're "fishing" for prospects. Who cares what page they enter your web site through,\; the important thing is that they find your site. You can also add information pages by searching the web for free content related to your industry. Usually, the authors only want proper credit and a link to their web site (to boost their link popularity). You can quickly build your website from just a few pages to 50, 100 or more by regularly adding content. In doing so, the search engines will see a more important site and an evolving site in that the website is "alive" with content that is growing. Descriptive File Names While probably not a major influence on the search engines, the file names of your webpages, photos, and graphics need to be called something, so why not use keywords related to your industry? My "contact" page, for example, isn't called contact.html but rather contact_web_designer.html. An easy way to prove that the search engines notice these things is to go to Google.com and click on the "Images" tab. Then put in the keyword "house" and search. Chances are the first page of results is filled with files named "house.jpg" or house.gif or bighouse.jpg, etc.... Some believe that descriptive domain names are helpful as well. In summary, good web design is a combination of what is appealing to the human eye and to the search engines' "eyes". To be effective, your website needs to cater to both audiences. And a good web designer can help you accomplish the results you're looking for! By Ron Souther, Ron's Webs Ron's Webs offers Clean, One-of-a-Kind, Web Designs, Webhosting, Internet Marketing, and Small Business Consulting Services. Create a "Custom" website without the typical "Custom" high price. Give Your Back Office to My Front Office! (Permission to post this article on your site is granted so long as my name and my active link are included with the article.)
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