Effective Web Site Design Basics

The Basics
Successful web site design requires that you look at all aspects of the site, including purpose, content, navigation, graphic design and search engine compatibility. Unfortunately, there are many web designers that focus on only one or two of these basics. Graphic artists tend to focus their web page design on the site graphics, images and colors; writers tend to focus on the written content; geeks tend to focus on technology. Professional web developers must include all of these, plus a focus on marketing and search engine optimization.

There are five Requirements for Success

• Alignment – the web site design must be aligned with your business goals. The most basic of these goals is to make a profit. Each section of the site must be focused on helping you reach at least one of your primary business goals.
• Purpose – each section of the web site (each web page design, in fact) must have a primary purpose… What do you want the web page to accomplish? This purpose should be viewed in the light of alignment (being aligned with your business goals) and moving the customer toward the purchasing threshold.
• Create Action – Each section of the web site design must clearly indicate the action you want the customer to take… What you want them to do? Remember, you cannot increase the effectiveness of your web site or an individual web page if the visitor does nothing.
• Relationship focused content – The content of each web page must be targeted to increasing trust and creating a positive emotional context. Creating a successful ebusiness web site means that you must always think of your content in terms of how well it increases trust or builds on a positive emotional context.
• Measurement – Each section of the web site design must be measurable. Without measurement you cannot know whether any change to your site improved or hurt the effectiveness of your site. How do you know you’re getting better if you don’t keep score? Effective measurement tells you if your web site is helping you meet your business goals.

These “five basic requirements for success” assumes that your web developer understands the basics of search engine friendly web design. (After years in the business we should know better than to assume.) While nothing can take the place of years of experience and constant research on the “whims” of search engines, the following guidelines will help you design a web sites that, at least, does not destroy any chance of being found by search engines.

You must first understand that search engines are design bigots. They care nothing for images, graphic design or color. They care only for words and not all words are equal. Where the words are located, the relative type size of the words and the frequency of the words are the search engine’s primary considerations. Search engines use these words to build an index of the information on your site. If you have no words (as defined by search engines) on your web page, search engines will have nothing to index. Copy that is part of a graphic does not count.

Opening Page (Home) – Most search engines give your default (Home page, index page) the highest priority. They assume that the opening page of your web site contains your most important information.

Flash:
· Search engines cannot read the “words” on your Flash page. To the search engine a Flash page is basically an empty page. If you have a web site design based on Flash search engines have no “words” to index. It is best if you incorporate portions of your web site design to flash but maintain enough text to give the search engine something to work with. 
Meta Tags:
· Most search engines do NOT read META tags (META KEYWORD & META DESCRIPTION). In fact, most of the search engines that do look at META tags don’t give them much relevance. If these are the only “words” on the page many search engines will not have anything to index.

Navigation:
· Search engines generally do not “read” the information within “script” tags (like JavaScript). If your web site navigation is completely in JavaScript the search engine may not be able to read your links to other pages on the web site. This means that only your home page will be indexed because the search engines can’t find the rest of them. 
· If you are using JavaScript navigation you must provide an alternate set of text navigation links on every page to make sure the search engine can index your whole site. In fact, this is a good idea even if you are not using “script” tags. 
· Search engines prefer in-line (key word) links as opposed to image links. Most search engines give higher relevance to words contained in links on your web page. Use keyword links whenever possible. 
· Make sure that every page on your site has keyword links to every other important page of your site.

Information Pages: Information pages are just what the name implies. They are web pages that provide information to the user and should be a part of every web page design. More importantly, they can be used as key word gardens. If the keyword you are trying to register is “blanket”, build a page called blanket.htm, use HTML <H></H> tags with “blanket” as the first or second word; build the word “blanket” into the body copy several times; create keyword links on the page that contain the word “blanket” and create keyword links on other pages in your site that point to this page using the word “blanket”. If you use images, make sure the .alt tags include the keyword.
Your new page does two things… It gives the site user information that they may be looking for and it gives search engine spiders all they need to index your page.

Absolutely Don’t:
· Mask links – Do not create links that are the same color (or almost the same color) as the background color.
· Repeat keywords over 4 or 5 times in the body copy (depends upon search engine).
· Use JavaScript or Image maps as the ONLY navigation for your site.
· Use an automatic HTTP Redirect on the home page with less than a five second delay.
· Use “Click Here” or “Go Here” as link text. Use your keywords in links whenever possible.

Absolutely Do:
· Include descriptive, keyword titles on every page (keep under 100 characters with most important keywords close to the beginning)
· Include descriptive key words in your site headlines, body copy and links. As a general rule, however, do NOT repeat the keywords more than 4 or 5 times on a page.
· Links on other sites that use your key words will generally increase your position in most search engines for that key word.
· Include META description and keyword tags for those search engines that use them.
· Use your most important keywords in text links to other pages.
· Use as many keyword links as possible.
· Use <h></h> (headline) tags with keywords.

While these simple guidelines will not get you into the top position for most key words or phrases, they will insure that your site is AT LEAST available for the search engines to index. 

One last bit of advice. We have generally found that a “paid” registration does not give you any better placement. Your best bet for being indexed by the search engines is to be in the major directories. Search engines are just programs that follow links from page to page and site to site looking for words to index. If you are in the major directories (Yahoo [$295.00 per year registration fee], Open Directory Project [No registration fee] and LookSmart [basically $15.00 per month]) search engine spiders will find and index your site. If your budget is short, use the open directory project. Choose your category in the open directory project carefully because a real, live person reviews every site.


This information is provided by Web Transitions, Inc.
©2002 Web Transitions, Inc.