Posts Tagged ‘website’

When people discuss Web site design, even design in general, they tend to think it focuses on page layout, color, animations and other aesthetic matters. These are part of the formula, of course, a big part. It helps to think of designing as being, more broadly, the process of strategizing, because as important as the look and feel of the site is its usefulness in capturing business by converting visitors into customers (assuming it’s a commercial enterprise). When you are designing your Web site with SEO in mind, you are looking at the big picture, not just the aesthetics.

It is crucial in a competitive market (and a recessionary one) to understand how your site’s overall architecture can make it more or less visible to search engines, and more or less empowered to rise in page rankings and other measurable results. There are numerous elements to your pages and site that can either interfere with or help the various search engines crawl through your site (like a spider, hence the term). Some elements can help and hinder you at the same time. Your navigation scheme and design technologies like Cascading Style Scripts (CSS) are two good examples.

Basic building blocks

It is still true, but perhaps not quite as true as it was a few years ago, that the most important pages of your site are closest to the root directory. The most common design (rather, architectural) recommendation here is to locate the home page, normally called index.html, in this area, as well as the REP robots.txt document (Robots Exclusion Protocol).

Among the myths in the Web world is that the search bots ignore everything below the third or fourth subdirectory. If this ever was the case, it is not today, because the spiders will now continue crawling as long as you have related pages linked the right way (the spider-friendly way). To aid in this effort, you are counseled by some experts to locate as many as 200 of your most important pages, if you even have that number, at the root. The recommendation refers to pages that are deemed important not by your IT department, or even some so-called SEO expert, but by your target audience. (A real SEO expert will likely know this, of course.)

Mapping and names

The navigation scheme for your site is a key element, naturally. Pull-down menus and rollover schemes are not as friendly and simple to use as buttons, but neither are as effective overall as good old hypertext links. It takes differing amounts of time to render the various navigation schemes, which favors the latter method, but the bottom line for you decision should be, once again, the preferences of your site visitors and target demographic. (On a side note, this is among the most important reasons that you should be trying to understand, quantify and qualify who those visitors and potential visitors are.)

Files names, directories and URLs are also important to strategize correctly. When users in an online poll were given a choice of two URLs, domain.com/carseats.html or domain.com/car/seats.html, over 90% chose the shorter one without the subdirectory. Having too many forward slashes (trivia: the actual word for a forward slash is virgule) in URLs is a common gripe that webmasters hear when they actually bother to get users’ feedback.

Page types

The professionals in this industry that focus on usability talk about specific types of pages, although some say there are seven, some say 11, some say more. The actual number is less critical than the underlying point, which is that SEO strategies need to deal with these different sorts of page layouts and architectures. The kind of page you are attempting to conceive, build and deploy should strongly affect the way you go about the tasks.

There are category/gallery pages, home pages, various landing pages, shopping cart pages and so on. You certainly would not optimize your shopping cart page the same way you would your home page, as this runs afoul of the need to craft not just the design/architecture but the all-important content on the pages. For example, the actions you are trying to get the visitors to take are entirely different for different page types. One page strategy may be to persuade, while another is to issue what is termed a call to action, most often related to sales. Do not mix your messages.

Bottom line

Good and effective site design involves issues of design, color, language, layout and the term that Apple made famous with its graphic interface, look and feel. Your strategy must be workable in the real world, today, while allowing creative flexibility and fine-tuning in the future. The bottom line is to increase your site conversions, right? If you just stay focused on what will work for the visitor rather than what is easiest to do, you will like the results. Good design on the Web is part art and part science, so get both hemispheres of your brain spinning and get to it.

Moonrise Productions is a web design company specializing in seo web design, custom web development and design. Whether you need social network web design or mobile web development, contact us for all your san francisco seo needs!

You have just crafted your entry into the digitally enhanced marketplace or your marketing department presently oversees a full-featured internet commerce proxy representing your global business services online. The definition of a truly functional website is dynamic and nearly unique in every online launch, but there are some universal themes that should be considered before giving approval to your development team to launch the result of years of your own hard work.

At the beginning of commercial interconnectivity, there were few choices and even though complicated in their own right, no real options. With the development of intricate relational databases and Geo-data and intuitive direct marketing, the possibilities and methodologies of doing business online are nearly limitless and the opportunities for re-inventing and strengthening your branding are very real.

Unfortunately, some executives, business owners and incompetent web developers continue to roll out online efforts that not only fail to service their customer base satisfactorily but also wreaks havoc with their sensitive data seriously affecting their bottom line. The only way to truly profit from the open field opportunity of web commerce or online branding is to break the cycle and approach your development projects with a practised and educated eye.

Common issues in corporate web-based efforts

If you are considering your launch or already in the midst of maintaining your site, it is in your best interests to examine your project, streamline your efforts and maximize your revenue return. There is no time like the present, and yes, if left unchecked, it could cost you serious points of profit that you should be returning to the shareholders in whatever dividend plan you have crafted into your incorporation. So what should you or your development team consider?

Since the advent of the GUI web interface we have become so used to, our visual online world and grown in leaps and bounds. The new technologies for creating multimedia and web app resource-sharing have made the landscape of coding a web project vast, full and entirely easy to get lost in unless you have a clear objective from the outset. Many online commercial entities are small business efforts and suffer from two distinct drawbacks.

In-house design – whether you are opening a site to sell your custom-made hemp t-shirts or you are a board member for Fed Ex, to consider making your web development efforts an in-house project unless that is your main avenue of service provision, you should be contracting the work to a reputable web development firm after completing the necessary due diligence. You know how to run your business, but you have to admit that it is highly unlikely that you or your IT and marketing department can build a truly beautiful and functional website.

The latest and greatest – don’t fall victim to this cutting-edge thrill seeking mode of development. For one thing, your website, like Facebook, will never be done and you will be having to heavily support and ever-changing online format that will not only put a unnecessary and inordinate strain on your cash flow, not to mention the havoc created with customer satisfaction as they struggled to navigate through your site after each one of your continual updates. There are flashy online app concepts or web plug-ins that require a fair amount of memory and a fair bit of bandwidth. These code giants take time to load and when your average web surfer waits about 10 seconds for a site to load then moves on, the drop in business or profitable visits to your site drops dramatically and in today’s market. Online failure can quite possibly cripple the company on a whole. Streamline your site, drop extraneous features and standardize your site map. Keep your business coming and coming quickly, who cares if there is a flash movie showing great moments in your company’s creation. If your users don’t stay around long enough to do business, the next great moment you’ll be adding to that flash movie will be your chapter 11 application.

Color for color’s sake – yes, you want to capture your online consumers, touch your client base, create a unique visual feeling, but your do not want to put together a jangled collection of the united colors of Benetton for the sole reason of visual punch. Color figures prominently in the human psyche and can evoke strong emotional responses. If you and/or your marketing managers understand this and work in conjunction with your development firm, you will have an incredibly strong marketing tool at your disposal. If you blindly stride ahead and approve some garish color scheme that’s bound to catch the eye of anyone navigating to the page, you may end up creating a visual palette too confusing to be appreciated and in some extremely unfortunate cases, you may end up offending or turning off your clientele on a visceral level without even being aware of it.

If you, along with your marketing and design team, examine these facets of your web presence, you stand a tremendous chance of increasing your traffic, retaining customers and adding an extensive positive number to your quarterly report. Seeming small issues, but ones that can cost you a great deal of money, can you afford not to look into it?

Moonrise Productions is a web design company specializing in both custom web development and design. Whether you need social network web design or mobile web development, contact us and we’ll get it done right!

Last week I stumbled upon a new software currently in beta form. It is called Adobe Photoshop and it can be used to edit photos and create websites, although not with one button click as I had so imagined. I ran out of tape on this edition because of the recession. Till next time, be safe!

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