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Starting the Website Design Process - November 10th, 2006
A well-designed site can often make or break a company trying to compete in the online market. There are many factors that go into the website design process, and I will try and outline a few of them here.
Creating User Profiles
It is essential that a company knows the type of person they want to target with their website, and that it is designed predominantly with them in mind. This means taking into account what kind of internet user they are and what they are likely to be looking for to get to your site. For example, a website about the technical aspects of computing will attract mostly advanced PC users who will likely have high-spec machines themselves, meaning the site can be designed for higher resolution screens and fast internet connections.
Website layout and branding
Ultimately, the look of your site has to attract users to it and keep them there. You could be selling the most useful product in the world, but if you’re site’s look and navigation is hard to follow, people wil leave very quickly. Make sure your site is easy to navigate and the content easy to read (create a comfortable contrast between the text and the background).
Work out your marketing goals
Once you have a site that people want to visit, it’s important you know what you want them to do when they get there. If you want your website to generate enquiries about your services, make sure potential customers know how to get in touch with you. You could create a contact form that is easily reachable from the homepage. If your website sells widgets, make it immediately obvious to someone that they can buy things there and then. Perhaps have a direct link to your most popular item on the homepage (Note: a general rule for all your subpages is that they should be no more than two clicks from the hompage).
Following these 3 basic principles will help you go a long way to creating a successful site, which in turn can seriously boost the success of your company.
Rik Weber
Web Designer
Website Design in Frames - November 3rd, 2006
Another “old drunk uncle” of website design is the use of frames on a website. A frameset used to be a popular and common way to let website designers create a single page that pulls in code from other pages and places it in set frames on the page. The advantage of this was that the header, footer or navigation bars would only need to be loaded once, saving bandwidth. It also allowed for parts of the page to be fixed while others could scroll.
The main disadvantage of using a frameset is that the content pulled in to the frames is impossible for a search engine to crawl, making it very difficult to index the site. This can be very damaging for a business hoping to find passing trade through search engines.
Fortunately there are a few ways to replicate a frameset and have the actual content on the page. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) allow you to place sections of content in fixed positions anywhere on a page, and make other sections scroll if required; while server-side languages such as PHP let website designers dynamically include external content depending on a given variable passed to the page. This way the effect of having an organised, seperated page is achieved while keeping all the content on each page for the search engines to index.
Rik Weber
SEO Programmer