Good web design is important to create a site that is attractive to visitors yet still works properly.
Whilst designers are good at looking at the navigation and aesthetics of a site, not every web designer will know about SEO or how to apply it to their design.
It is important for every website to be ranked well in the search engines because it is the search engines that send the largest percentage of visitors to most sites. Also, when most people are looking for products or services online they turn to a search engine to find them the sites that best match their query.
To do well in a search engine your site needs to be optimised. This is what you will be paying for if you hire a company to do search engine optimisation (SEO). Whilst you can do SEO on a site that has already been built, it helps if the SEO considerations are taken into account at the design stage.
There are many ways to optimise a site and a few are mentioned below.
It is important to effectively use meta tags for a page. The meta tags are the title tag, description tag and alt tags. The title tag is the one that shows as the tab name at the top of the web page. It should be succinct, unique and describe the page - not the entire website. The description tag is important for the click through rate. Again it needs to be succinct, unique and descriptive of the page. The alt tag is the alternative words for an image. They should describe the image e.g. ‘solid oak wardrobe’ rather than leaving the name the camera gave it e.g. IMG001.
Designers also sometimes overlook content in the form of text. The text informs the search engines what the page is about and gives it some substance. Content must be unique and ideally a few hundred words long.
Search engines look for an XML sitemap to tell them what URLs belong to the site. It is like the sitemap for humans except it is in web code. Usually they can be found if you type in /sitemap.xml at the end of the domain name.
Often, designers will simply put your site live and hand it over to you. However, once the site goes live, you will need all other versions of your site pointing to the one you want as your main one. This means that if you have a .com and .co.uk version of your site, you should choose the best one and use a 301 redirect from the other one. A 301 redirect will tell a search engine that the page it was looking for has permanently moved to a new location and any humans that land on the page will be redirected to the new page. Any links that were pointing to the old page will pass on their value to the new page.
If you are using a web designer, make sure that they have a basic understanding of SEO and make sure you know who is going to be responsible for filling in meta tags etc and who will perform the required redirects.
The sooner you get your site optimised the quicker it can start to work for you in the search engines.
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Web design is the creation of web pages using coding languages. You may think that the design process would be similar to designing for print but the way that people experience a website is different - they can come in at any page and will scan for information. Web users are very goal driven and if they don’t find what they are after easily and quickly they will soon click away to another site. This means that for a website to be effective, the designer must create something that looks good, holds interest and is easy to navigate. If the website is for a company, it has to reflect that company in a good light and be in keeping with the perception of their brand.
There are many potential pitfalls for web designers but they can be avoided with proper training. Whether you searched the internet for web design Salisbury or asked your business contacts about web design in Wiltshire, your web design company need to be aware of what NOT to do as much as what TO do. Whatever method you use to find them, your web designer needs to know what they are doing.
One of the potential mistakes a designer can make is to keep the same colour for a link once it has been clicked. Users find it useful for links to change colour because it helps them navigate and tells them where they have already been. Whilst this function helps people avoid re-visiting pages that weren’t useful or that they don’t need to go to again, it can also help them quickly find a page that was particularly useful or interesting to them.
Designers are now able to fix a font size using CSS style sheets and sometimes they are tempted to do just this. Whilst it may seem a good idea to a young designer that wants to make sure everyone views the page as they intended, not everyone has perfect eyesight. By disabling the ability for a browser to change up the font size, anyone with bad eyesight is disadvantaged staight away and perhaps even totally excluded from the site. This is obviously not a good thing to do.
Text is useful for websites because it gives people something to read and it is also helpful for search engine optimisation (SEO). Search engines such as Bing and Google like text so that they can determine what a page is about and if it is relevant to searcher’s queries. Having said this, adding text on a site in a big block isn’t good. As we have already already seen, web users scan pages to try and quickly pick out the important points. A big block of text is very difficult on the eye. It needs to be split up and condensed as much as possible. Important wording will benefit from appearing in bold.
Many people like things to be predictable. When they browse a website they are no different. If a website starts doing things they don’t expect they will have an incentive to click away. A website should follow the conventions of the web and act like other websites do in terms of functionality. If clicking the company logo takes users on most websites back to the home page, they won’t want it to unexpectedly take them to a game on another site. Designers need to give users what they want.
If a web designer knows what the aim of the website is and who the target audience is, they will be able to design a better site. This must be communicated to them in the design brief. It is down to the designer to ask the right questions and for the person briefing to give as much information as possible to help them. The designer will then need to use that information to come up with an amazing website. If the designer has a proper brief and they use their design skills and knowledge of things to avoid, a fantastic website is possible.
Link reblogged from SEO web design Salisbury
With the rise of fast internet access and consumer trust, online puchasing is an increasingly popular way for the British to get their products, whether it’s the weekly shop, clothes, or presents for a loved one.
During 2010, a survey of 2000 UK shoppers found that 42.6% bought items over the web…
Source: seowebdesignsalisbury
Link reblogged from SEO web design Salisbury with 4 notes
If you are a business that requires a web presence, you will have to have some sort of website and it will need designing so that it looks professional. The design involves layout, navigation, colour selection and more.
You could try to design your own website but this isn’t usually a good idea…
Source: seowebdesignsalisbury
