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Website Design Tips
An Introduction to Website Design
The Internet is used by millions daily - millions of websites - billions of web pages.
Websites do not exist to demonstrate the technical brilliance of the programmer, the artistic talents of the designer or the eloquence of the marketing department.
Websites act as data repositories. The higher its quality and the faster it is made available to a visitor, the more successful the website will be.
Data is the raison d'étre of the website and it is fundamental to the success of the website.
Never concentrate on appearance at the expense of content.
Firstly, the visitor's appreciation of the quality of the website's appearance wears off quickly if the content is mediocre.
Secondly, poor content detracts from good search engine rankings. Good content will have incorporated keywords into both the content and the code.
So, focus the website, write good content and put it all together in a pleasing package.
Step 2: Planning
The Purpose of Your website?
Quite simply, it is to bring you business.
A successful website demonstrates the confluence of elements of differing importance.
To be successful, a website must attract visitors, engage them and encourage them to act in a way that benefits your business.
Are you selling a product, a service, displaying information or generating leads? Whatever it is, it must be found and digested as quickly as possible.
What is Your Target Audience?
Is it predominantly male. female, young, old, corporate? Your website must focus and project an appropriate ambience they will understand and with which they will interact.
If your audience is 50+ - easy to read. If it is corporate - restrained colours. If it is rural communities, ensure that pages download quickly.
Durban Website Designers takes care to listen to clients' needs and then articulates them into a functional website.
Decide on the purpose of the website before any design work is done.
Step 3: Your website's Appearance
For many, this is the first step, however, if time is spent on deciding on the purpose of your website, ideas about it's appearance could be revised.
There are many impressive website designs, but they may not fit your own business. Your design should be subtle, yet unique.
A common mistake is to fill the design with vivid colour which overwhelms the visitor and makes it more difficult to draw his eye to items of interest. An even worse mistake is to create a first page that consists of nothing but a fancy graphic. Search engines and visitors hate these.
A space of approximately 700 x 350 pixels is the average visitor's screen 'real estate'. You must get your message acoss in that small space - and in 6 seconds!
Navigation must be explanatory, logical and simple. Labyrinthine, arcane and ambiguous navigation is the death of many websites.
Step 4: Lay out Your Website for Usability
Having a delightful appearance, crisp, focussed content that is search engine friendly is not enough if it is all over the show.
Visitors won't read your web pages - at least not initially. They will skim them looking for keywords that might interest them. Only then will they actually read the content.
Monolithic blocks of small text are practically illegible and are seen on many websites. The philosophy seems to be - the more we can squeeze onto a page, the more our visitors will learn about what we do. We provide the visitor with the ability to resize the ptext if he wishes.
Paragraphs should be small, tight 'text bites' and broken up at appropriate intervals.
Little use is made on many pages of white space to separate content and draw the reader's eye to other parts of the page.
Printing - simple enough but there are too many websites with spidery text on dark backgrounds and printouts that lose half the content.
Durban Website Designers has designed many websites and avoids these common mistakes by ensuring that the pages are easy to assimilate. Our Website Content Editing service also looks at the layout of your pages.
Step 5: Content Editing
So, your content is in your website, its looking good. Time to sit back?
No, Mark Twain was right ("The only good word is a deleted one"). Its time to relook at the content and make sure that its relevant, organized and readable. Use someone who is new to the website who will pick up typos, grammatical errors and ambiguities.
Pages are often far too long, forcing repeated scrolling. If the content is good, visitors won't mind too much but if it's poor and they have to scroll, they will quickly lose interest and leave.
If a page has to be long, a small summary table should be provided at the top of the page linking to the page's main points.
The search engine Google looks for keywords/key phrases entered by a potential visitor and displays the first instance of it with surrounding text in its search results list.
What sort of text are your keywords surrounded by? Will they make sense to someone looking at Google's search results?
Durban Website Designer's Content Editing service ensures your message is articulated and that key phrases are surrounded by relevant text.
Step 6: Search Cues
The quality of your content both as recognized by your visitors and search engines is important but only part of the whole story.
META tags are invisible to visitors but tell search engines which are important keywords/phrases, what the purpose of the page is and where to go and collect more information in your website. Much is made of META tags but Google ignores them almost completely.
Other search engines do not and META tags have to be completed skilfully. Many pages give search engines no help.
In the content itself, there are many opportunities to help a search engine along with hidden tags.
Google looks at the title tag (the text that appears in the browser titlebar), the content, hidden tags and finally, at your 'link popularity'. In other words, how many websites link to you. The more the better, providing they are appropriate.
Many websites are still HTML based. Massive amounts of HTML code confuse search engines (and add to download times).
Durban Website Designers uses fast style sheet-based pages that contain little code so that the content of the page is very visible to search engines. We also offer a Search Engine Optimization service.
Step 7: Testing
Sounds obvious but because of the variety of constantly changing variables on the Internet, it is essential.
Check whether all the links work. Broken links damage credibility.
Secondly, does the website display well in major browsers? 96% of visitors will use either Internet Explorer or Firefox.
The remainder is divided between Safari and Opera and should be accommodated.
Thirdly, the website should display well both on a PC and on an Apple.
Do your colours confuse those with colour blindness? Can your content be understood easily by those for whom English is not their native tongue?
Finally, does the website display well on computers with a low colour depth? Very few computers operate using only 16 colours but the website should at least be legible on these machines.
Durban Website Designers goes to great lengths to ensure that its websites are standards compliant and display well on all major browsers.
Step 8: Publishing
Not quite yet.
Durban Website Designers publishes your draft website to a temporary directory on the Internet so you and your colleagues can see how it is progressing. We thus have a good idea how long it takes to download.
Slow pages are the single biggest complaint from Internet users. Text does not slow pages down but we need to ensure that there are no images or other components.
Can pictures be compressed more? Do we need all those pictures? Do they contribute to the website other than by increasing the download time?
Can the code be trimmed more? What speed increase can we gain by compressing the page?
Now its time to publish your website and have your launch party.
Next, you need to know how well it is doing. Who is visiting, are their numbers going up? Who is making return visits, where in the website are they spending most time? 'Hits' give no idea of the quality of your visitors.
The website's server log will tell you.
Step 9: Maintaining Your Website
Big mistake - most companies forget about their website once it is published. Business will surely pour in.
The purpose of a website is to generate traffic - visitors, to get them to return and to translate the visits into business.
Let us design and maintain your website - you get all design costs back and more.
Maintain your website, add new content, new photos, updated specs, tighten any loose ends and to add extra value. And of course let your clients know.
And, importantly, tuning the search engine cues in the pages to get higher rankings. Search engine rankings are transient and change frequently as new websites are indexed by search engines.
All websites need to be compared with the competition and refined regularly to maintain and increase search rankings.
Durban Website Designers offers two options for website maintenance - contract or when needed at economical rates and we suggest strongly that maintenance be part of your budget in addition to web design and hosting.
Step 10: Adding Value to Your Website
Adding value can take many forms. Some, like Flash animation and extra graphics will come at the expense of download time and hence, usability. Others, however, do not.
There is massive competition out there and the goal is to get your website firstly to be picked out and secondly, recognized by visitors as something special.
One way of doing this is to add a resource area to your website where you talk about matters related to your work and perhaps provide visitors with links to more helpful pages. More repeat traffic = more business + higher search rankings.
Another is to add a News page with all the latest events. This is a long term commitment and has to be kept up to date. The same thing applies to eZine newsletters. If you choose to publish one, make sure that you have something to say and that it is kept topical.
If you have additional information not suitable for the Internet, add a Contact form so that interested visitors can ask for it and you can find out more about them along the way.
Web Tip #15
Beware SEO experts. If you cannot find their own site in Google, what chance have visitors got of finding yours?
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