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Moving Forward With Your Website Design & Development Project
In the last article we looked at the first stages of website design and development and considered the different options for having your site built or improved upon.
These included doing it yourself by using templates or going on a course for one of the website design packages or using a professional website designer. We also considered whether you should use a freelancer or a larger website design development company and what sort of budget you should set aside.
When using a professional designer/developer I stressed the importance of briefing them properly and managing the project closely, not only to control costs but also to ensure that the site is designed so as to help your chances in terms of natural search rankings on the search engines.
Key Search Engine Considerations
Assuming that featuring highly in natural search results is important to you, which it should be unless you have a considerable budget to drive traffic to your site via paid-for offline and online marketing activities (and arguably SEO should be considered even then), you need to consider how the design of your site affects you in terms of search engine optimisation.
A great many factors affect how you rank in the natural search results of the search engines and we will discuss these in detail in future articles, however it is crucial that you consider some core components of search engine optimisation (SEO) in how your site is designed.
To have any chance of being ranked highly in the search engines you need to design your site in way that means that the search engines can find and read the content of your site.
The use of imagery such as photos and graphics (such as logos) is essential if your site is going to look attractive to users - after all you are selling a product that the customer cannot see until they get there. However, the fundamental problem with imagery in SEO terms is that the search engines cannot read images and therefore give any value to them in terms of SEO.
Whilst you can put an ‘alt tag’ on an image, which is the text that appears when you hover over an image and which can be read by the search engines as well as your users, the space the image takes up will not give you the same readable text as if the space was allocated to text.
Of course you cannot just fill your web pages with text, but you should ensure that there is a fair balance between imagery and text, so that there is enough text on the page for the search engines to read and index. As a rule of thumb you should aim for at least 250 readable words on each web page.
The main method of building web pages with content that is readable by search engines is HTML (hyper text markup language) and such code is used by design packages such as Dreamweaver, one of the main web design packages used.
Make sure you ask your designer what package they are using, how much imagery they plan to use, where they plan to place it and ensure that all images are alt tagged, so you at least get some text associated with the space given up for images.
The other key element of website design in terms of SEO is ensuring the engines can find their way through your site and this is directly affected by the navigation structure, which we will discuss below.
Navigation Issues
At the core of you site’s design will be its navigation structure – how users find their way around your site.
In order to make users do what you want them to do – stay on the site and find their way to a product or service you wish them to buy – you need to make your site navigation easy to follow.
Ideally every page on the site should be no more than three clicks from the home page, if not two.
Every page should also link back to the home page and to any main pages, so that users can find their way around easily.
You should also include a site map, usually at the foot of page, so users can browse all the pages on the site in one place.
Aside from helping your users, having a well thought out navigation structure also helps the search engines, as the easier it is for the search engine to find its way around your site, the more chance you have of the various pages in your site being indexed by them.
Make sure you discuss the navigation structure in detail with your designer, ensuring that the main categories of information are identified and included.
Usually your navigation bar will reside across the top of your page or down the left hand column, with key sections and pages included in it, whilst less important page links can go at the foot of the page.
It is also important to make sure that the navigation is readable by the search engines, so be careful of image links and javascript (a code used in addition to HTML, which the engines cannot execute) and ensure that your navigation is designed such that the engines can follow it or put a readable alternative on the page.
By ensuring your designer/developer considers the above you will be on the right track to having a site design that is attractive to users and which helps the search engines to read and navigate your site.
Next time we’ll look at other website design issues, choosing a domain name and hosting.
Tim Harding
www.reallyusefulwebsites.co.uk
Tim Harding wrote this article for Travel Trade Gazzette, the leading travel industry trade publication.
Tim Harding is Managing Director of Really Useful Websites Limited, an internet marketing consultancy. Prior to launching Really Useful Websites Tim was Marketing Director at NCL and Senior Marketing Manager at Airtours Holidays.
