Website Design TutorialWebsite Design - Turorial Too many Businesses place the design and maintenance of their company website in the hands of the IT Department because they class it as"something to do with computers". Or in the hands of their mates who know a little bit about pcs and who is acquainted with Microsoft Word! This is totally wrong! Having a business website is second only to having an advert or advertising on the television, we would not let our uncle John film our television advertisement just because he's a dab-hand with the camcorder and did a good job of Sheila's wedding now would we??? The planning, design, maintenance and general care of a website should be a product of creativity, Marketing, search engine optimization, image handling and IT. A website is a marketing tool. Your Website Designer MUST understand this. It's not something you throw away to IT. The many related aspects of achieving good visibility on the Internet it has to be of an artful and skillful design, including the hidden aspects of good website design which are your META tags, ALT tags, keyword density considerations and link relevance, all of which are essential to the marketing process. There are three options - do it yourself; get someone in your business to do it in-house; get an outside expert or design agency to do it. The coding language for websites is HTML (hypertext markup language). I recommend that everyone gets a basic grounding in HTML; it looks very complicated to begin with but is actually quite easy - it's just based on toggling commands on and off. I recommend a good HTML tutorial, and there are plenty out there. Just type in "html tutorial" into any search engine and you're stuck for choice. There are some good applications that allow you to design websites without HTML skills (Word, MS Frontpage, Macromedia Dreamweaver). But a little knowledge is very useful, especially if using Dreamweaver, where a split-screen option allows you to create web pages with ease in a graphical mode and then tweak the result using basic HTML skills. HTML may be written using a simple utility like Microsoft's Notepad, supplied with Windows, but there are other editors available. Dreamweaver is by far our favorite, but is mainly for the experienced. A novice website designer may be terrified of Dreamweaver and would not be able to navigate entirety of this very complex website design program. We also like to tweak the plain html of our website in NotePad which is a Windows standard program. In NotePad you can view the entire html code as a search engine would view it. Dreamweaver and many other WYSIWYG "what-you-see-is-what-you-get" website design programs can very often put html codes and commands in the design of your website which a totally unnecessary to its design. Some people like to use Ready Made Website Templates in their design. This is ok for a website design as long as it is customized to suit your business, it has to be customized so the design of your website suits the message you are trying to portray in your site. It has to be redesigned for you, reflect you in a way it should, and in the way you want. If you do choose to use a website template for your design be aware, though, you will still need the basic HTML skills to ensure your site is search engine friendly and that you can customize it to your specifications. Also, you should not download or use templates that contain frames. Frames can sometimes look good BUT (there is always a "but") they are not good for search engines at all. If you ever get the chance, when you visit a website that has been designed with frames, try to "view source" which will show you the html the page is written in, we almost guarantee the browser will only pick up the html of the top frame (the pane at the top which mostly only contains the company name) This is also what the search engine will see. It will not find your masses of relevant copy that took you hours to compose, not will it get as far as your ALT Tags and possibly not even a single word actually on your page, so the story here is... do not use frames if you wish to use the search engines as a free tool to promote your website It is critical at the start of the design stage to find the keywords that people are searching by on the Internet, which you should include on your website, both in your visible text and your META text. There is a free search suggestion tool at Overture. But (there's that "but" again) your best bet is to put yourself in the visitors shoes. Think and brainstorm what words they will be using on search engines. If your business is about "Tennis Equipment" you may think the keyword here is "Tennis" Unfortunately there must be 3 million website out there that mention the word "tennis", being realistic, what chance do you or any of us have at our website appearing on the first page...Very Little. Which in effect is good. If you were search for "tennis shoes" what words would you use to find them...Yep You got it "tennis shoes", for tennis shoes, there would only be around 6,000- not so hard to get on the page now. You could also optimize your website for the terms "Tennis Rackets" "Tennis Balls" and even "tennis equipment". "Tennis alone has no meaning and too broad for you to receive any quality visitors. The secret is there is no secret just try not to be too specific, but to be specific enough to enable a narrow enough search to reach your website. If you operate locally then this should not be ignored: if you are a dentist based in Cambridge then "dentists in Cambridge" would be what people could search for, and find your website without any difficulty. The visual aspect: the basic rules of good design are to keep it simple, easy and FAST to load (how quick was this page to load? People will just click the Stop button if the amount of graphics files and Flash animation slows it down to an intolerable level). The site must be easy to navigate (have a menu, or navigation bar on every page of your site, on the left hand side and at the top of each page - ideally people should not need to scroll down to see the whole menu, although sometimes this is unavoidable), always check your links, and always check for typos. Keep in mind that what you see on your own computer may not be what other people see on theirs. What is shown in Internet Explorer is not always the same as in Netscape Navigator (and there are other browsers out there, too, including AOL, Opera and Mosaic). Also, if you design your website on a PC, don't forget to check how it looks on a Mac. Thirdly, there's the question of screen resolution: what will look great in 800 x 600 pixels will look very different in 1280 x 1024 pixels, and all gradations in between will be different as well. What is most important is that the user has access to all informational content without having to scroll to the left or right, or at least not much. Scrolling down is probably unavoidable, but should be kept to a minimum, unless you have a massive amount of informational content that you wish to contain within the same |
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