| Do you want your website to
look beautiful? Or do you want it to be profitable?
These aims are not mutually exclusive. However, many website
designers were trained as graphic designers, and they can produce
sites that look good but don't result in sales. Here's why.
Sites should be
- Quick to load
- Not irritating to users
- Search engine friendly, so that they can be found!
- Easy to navigate to find product pages
However certain web design techniques will result in problems that
give rise to the opposite of the above. The causes of these problems
include:
Using 'frames' technology will often lead to search engines being
unable to find the content on your site. So there little chance of
your site being placed high on the search engines' results. It is
possible to have a site using frames which is still accessible to
search engines, but it has to be especially designed for the
purpose.
- Use of 'flash' and excessive use of images
Nearly all search engines do not understand flash, so may never
get past a flash doorway page to your site. In addition, visitors to
your site may merely see the flash page as a barrier to getting to
the real content.
Large numbers of images will slow down your site. Sometimes sites
are designed with whole pages constructed from images. Search
engines will not be able to analyse the content of these pages.
It should be easy for someone to get round the site and find what
they want! The navigation should be implemented so that search
engines can follow the links and find all the pages in your site!
- Failure to emphasize benefits
Always make sure that your site emphasizes the benefits that you
can provide to the potential customer, and why they should buy from
you rather than go elsewhere. Think in terms of what the site user
is looking for.
Read more about
how web design can affect search engine rankings.
There are a number of specific techniques which will cause your
site to figure higher in search engines' results. These techniques
change over time. We specialise in producing web pages which are
"search engine friendly". This is known as
search engine optimisation.
Check out some of the sites we've
designed, and contact us for more
information. In addition, check out our
website promotion information which shows how your website can be
marketed through Google and Yahoo's sponsored links.
|
