Online Marketing Begins With A Well Designed Website
If you own a business and you are thinking about doing some Internet marketing then I certainly wish you all the best. But you should give some serious thought about the implementation of your online marketing plans. Don’t just jump in and hope for the best.
Many companies go online and immediately start marketing through Facebook and similar websites without a website of their own. That’s OK, but where are you sending people to for more information about your company if they want to know? Without a website you’ll find it difficult to really connect with people long term.
Your Internet marketing plans should center around your home, or hub. That’s your website. Everything else you do online should go to support your web design and the content on your website. Start there and move out in concentric circles to other avenues of Internet marketing. You’ll be much more effective.
How Web Design And Content Are Connected
One of the oldest adages concerning Internet marketing is “Content is King.” The adage simply means that content is the most important aspect of your website because without content you really have no website. But that doesn’t mean that web design isn’t important.
Perhaps one of the things that many webmasters don’t think about is what your web design is actually for. You should consider your web design template as a shell for your content. If it were nuts, the web design would be the shell and the content would be the nut.
So what is the web design for, exactly?
Well, your web design is the face of your website. Having an attractive web design is much more important today than it was in the past. Ten years ago you could have an ugly site and get away with it. Not so much today. That doesn’t mitigate the importance of content, but you should consider that your site’s web design will either drive visitors away or attract them to the content. And there’s the rub. If your web design doesn’t point visitors to the content then it’s failing you. Pretty or not.
Are W3C Standards Necessary?
You’ll hear website designers often refer to W3C standards. But what does that mean, exactly? What is W3C and is it necessary?
W3C stands for World Wide Web Consortium. It is an organization committed to establishing consistent standards for web design and other technical aspects of the Web in order to ensure that everyone anywhere can access the Web and participate in its powerful communication qualities. Their goal is worthy and honorable.
However, building a website that is not compliant with W3C standards will not result in any penalties or degradation in search engine rankings. You do not have to build a site that is W3C compliant in order to be successful, earn you money or grow in popularity.
That said, there are several reasons why you might want to build your website to be compliant with W3C standards.
- If your site validates with W3C then it will be seen as more credible in the eyes of many Internet users.
- By validating your site with W3C you show that you are sensitive to the needs of handicapped Web users.
- You can often find egregious errors in your code through the W3C validation process.
- If you are converting your website from one rendering technology to another (for instance, from HTML to XML or from Web browser technology to mobile browser) then W3C can assist in that process.
The most important thing to understand about W3C is that it will not give you any advantage in the search engines to have your site validated. Non-validated sites can outrank you for your keywords. They can outperform you in PPC. They could get a higher PageRank or receive other benefits that your site does not. But it wouldn’t hurt you to learn more about the standards that make the Web a better place.
Web Design With A CMS
Should you design your website with a content management system (CMS)? There are some definite advantages to doing so.
Some people don’t like CMS applications because the perception is that they aren’t very good at SEO. But that’s not really true any more. Joomla has come a long way in its implementation and WordPress has always been good at SEO. It hasn’t always been a great CMS tool, but lately it has expanded into quite a web design alternative.
One of the primary benefits to using a CMS is that you don’t have to hard code every web page. The CMS does a lot of the code work for you. But you also have tools to help you develop your website when you work with a CMS. WordPress calls them templates and plugins. Joomla calls them templates and modules. They do the same thing.
The key to CMS web design is to pick a template that you like and alter it for your own use. Then take the modules that do the things you need for your website and install them. Then it’s a matter of marketing.
Should you use a CMS for web design? You don’t have to, but it’s one option.
Social Apps To Add To Your Web Design
Now that the Web has migrated into a fully social platform, modern web design necessitates that webmasters include some social aspect into their websites. Invite people to participate in what you are doing at your website and to become a part of the content production process. There are a number of ways you can do this. Here are some ideas:
- Start a blog – This is the most basic social media application and if you want to make your website more social, this is a good place to start.
- Create a forum – Forums are old school, but they are still valuable places to connect. They are difficult to manage, however. Nevertheless, if you can get people to participate, a forum is a good social tool.
- Open a chat room – This is another throwback to the earlier Web days, but a chat room is a good addition to any website.
- Google Friend Connect – Google’s own do-it-yourself social platform. It has its weaknesses, but it’s strength is ubiquity. This is social web on the go.
- Facebook Connect – Where Google Friend Connect is social across multiple websites in unrelated niches, Facebook Connect is proprietary and makes your website an extension of your Facebook experience. This is truly a social app you should not ignore.
- Twitter Widget – Share with your site visitors what you are talking about on Twitter.
- Amazon Wish List – Amazon actually has several widget you can incorporate into your website. The Net’s largest book store can be a part of your website.
- Any Ol’ API - Take any social app with an API and add it to your site. You’ll need some development experience or a developer at your disposal. Turn your site into what you want it to be – a social center of its own.
Today’s web design incorporates elements of the social web. If your website isn’t social then you’re behind the times.
Web Design: Deceptively Easy
Web design is deceptively simple. You’d think that all you have to do is design something pretty and people will flock to it and click the buy now button. But it isn’t really that simple. There is a lot to think about when designing a website for any business.
No. 1, design issues are just one concern. Not the only concern. Web designers and business owners also need to think about the following concerns:
- Search engine optimization
- Social media marketing
- Paid advertising models
- Driving traffic
- Navigability
- Metrics
- User perception
- Cost of development
Web design is a whole marketing plan, not just a one-time event. You can’t just throw up a web page and forget about it, hoping the world will come to see it. Just as important as design attractiveness are visitor ease of use, search engine optimization, and page-to-page navigation. Just for starters.
When it comes to web design, you can’t afford to leave it to amateurs. Let a professional handle your design work and increase your odds of profitability.
A Web Design Tip To Keep You In The Social Loop
If you are a heavy social media user (and I highly recommend that you be) then I have a hot web design tip for you. Add a widget to your sidebar or a prominent position on your website that shows your latest tweets and social media activity.
These widgets are relatively easy to make. If you use WordPress as a blog or CMS then you can add a plugin that does this for you. If you are designing your website with straight HTML then you can go to one of the many widget websites and create a widget.
The best placement for your social widget is at the top of your sidebar or the bottom of the right-hand sidebar. If your social reputation is important to you then prominent placement of your widget above the fold will make sure it is visible to all your site visitors. But if you take a look at eye tracking software then you’ll find that the most looked at parts of a web page are the top left corner and the bottom right corner. People tend to scan from left to right and top to bottom starting in the top left corner.
A widget showing your latest tweets and social media activity can get you more followers on your social networks and on your blog. I highly recommend this web design tip.
Why Stylesheets Are Important
CSS – cascading style sheet – is a fairly new method of designing web pages, one that separates the presentation from the content. The main reason style sheets are important is because they allow you to design all the pages of your website with one file rather than use HTML to design every single web page and all the elements on each page. With CSS you can set the design elements one time and apply them to all of your pages by calling the stylesheet forward at the appropriate time.
Web design is no easy task any way you look at it. But HTML has its limitations. With CSS you can overcome those limitations and design your entire website from one document.
Stylesheets operate on classes, the essential element of web design with CSS. Every element on a web page can be assigned a class and you can design a unique look for every web page on your website by using one stylesheet. All you do is assign each web page element a class as defined by the stylesheet.
There are many advantages to doing it this way, but suffice it to say that a website designed with stylesheets is much more flexible than one that isn’t.
PHP: The Versatile Web Design Language
PHP is one of the most versatile web design languages available today. There is so much you can do and the options are very wide. You virtually have your choice of server types, hosting, database options, and many other variables. One of the best aspects to PHP is its ability to embed easily into HTML.
While you can embed PHP into HTML, unlike HTML, it is a server-side language. HTML is a browser-based language.
Web design is a lot more robust with PHP. You can script forms and do all sorts of other server-side scripting with PHP. You can also write command line scripts for your web pages. And you can also design desktop applications. But that’s not all.
PHP is compatible with all the major operating systems – Linus, Unix, OS X, Windows, and many more.
With PHP, your web design has so much more flexibility and a wide range of web design options is available to you. I highly recommend the use PHP for web design, not in place of HTML, but in conjunction with HTML.
Is Web Design Going Away?
It is easier now than ever before to get a website. You can practically throw one up yourself with no training and no web design background. With some popular content management systems on the market – WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, et. al. – you can build a site from scratch without knowing any HTML or code. And many web hosts offer sitebuilders for free. Sign up, pay your small monthly hosting fee, and start building. Easy, right?
Yes, easy. But not necessarily a benefit.
There is still search engine optimization to contend with. And just because you can build a site with no knowledge of web design doesn’t mean you should. Surveying websites built by designers and non-designers, even designers who use content management systems, there is still a big difference. And it’s noticeable.
Let’s face it, good web design requires specialized knowledge in the following areas:
- Search engine optimization
- Graphic design
- HTML (hypertext markup language) – Even if you use a content management system to build your website, a working knowledge of HTML is helpful.
- CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) – Again, even with a content management system, you might want to make some tweaks to your site sitewide and a working knowledge of CSS will be helpful.
- JavaScript and PHP – Two more coding languages that can be helpful.
- Working with images
- Copywriting
- Sales – Writing for the web is selling; if you can’t write sales copy then you’ll need to hire someone who can.
- Web standards
- Online marketing strategies
As you can see, there is a lot to learn when doing it yourself. You can take the time to learn it and fail by trial and error a few times until you succeed, or you can hire a guide to help you. Web design isn’t going away any time soon. If anything, experts in web design will always be needed.
Should You Build Your Site With A Template Or Straight HTML?
Website design is not an exact science. It is part art and part science, which might come as a surprise to some people. Those people might consider it 100% art.
I consider it partly a science because there are some technical aspects to website design that require a scientific-like approach to thinking. Artistic endeavors are typically right brain activity. Science hails from the logical part of the brain, which is on the left hemisphere of the big grey lobe.
But whether you approach web design from a scientific or artistic perspective is largely how you see your role as web designer. If you are strictly artistic in your approach then you might look for a template and move things around as you see fit. If you are more scientific, or at least a mixture, then you may prefer to build your site with straight HTML.
A template can be good and save you some time. But there are things to look out for. Is your template optimized for search engines? If not, you’d better be prepared to modify it or ditch it. With HTML, you can influence that fight right from the beginning.
Website design really is not so cut and dry. There are a lot of variables and you have to remain flexible. Whether you built with a template or straight HTML isn’t as important as making sure that your site ranks well for its keywords and that it is capable of converting traffic to sales. If you can do it with a template then you should; if you prefer HTML then you should go that route. Either way, a great site is a great site.
WordPress As A Web Design Tool
WordPress has come a long way since its first introduction. Over the years the blogging software has earned a solid reputation for being an easy-to-use platform with better than average SEO benefits for users. One of the cool things about WordPress is its world class support and the never ending list of plugins available. But I’d say that in the last year WordPress has stepped out as one of the top content management systems on the market and one of the things that makes it so useful is the ability to design a great web site using only the tools available in the package.
In the old days web designers would borrow an off-the-shelf WordPress theme and that served a useful purpose. But in the last couple of years a few savvy web designers have developed premium themes that anyone can purchase and those themes offer benefits that are not available with off-the-shelf themes. One benefit is the ability to actually design a custom website with strong SEO benefits. WordPress can actually be used to build a website without a blogging feature, which makes it a robust content management system deserving of the best respect.
When it comes to web design today, you don’t even need to know HTML. You can use a CMS like WordPress with a snazzy premium theme and design your site like a pro. I think that’s awesome.
Web Design Tip: How Many Sidebars Do You Need?
Recent web design styles have websites showcasing multiple sidebars. In many cases, you’ll see two sidebars – one on the left and one on the right. But you might often see both sidebars on the same side of the page as well. Then there are the three sidebar styles. Rarer, but still common.
The question must arise when you are designing your website, how many sidebars do you need? It’s no easy answer, but it is worth some consideration.
There are many different reasons for building a website with multiple sidebars. You’ll have to consider your website’s needs. And your audience’s needs and expectations. Do you have a lot of pages on your site that you could link to from one of your sidebars. How about several sister websites in the same family? Or do you sell links or advertising on your website?
Sometimes, webmasters add sidebars that aren’t necessary. They choose a web design because of it’s coolness factor and not because of practical concerns. The most important thing is to design a website that meets the needs of your users. Everything else is a matter of taste.
Web Design Tip
Here’s a quick web design tip you can implement right away and it will only take a few minutes. It’s really a branding element you can use to help establish your brand online but it just takes one line of code.
A favicon is a little icon that displays next to the URL in the address box of your browser. You can create one out of your logo, or any image, in just a few minutes. Go to Favicon.cc and upload your image or create one. Follow the directions and save your favicon to your hard drive. It should end with the .ico file extension.
You want to keep your favicon simple. Not too complex. Just like your company logo. If done right, it will brand your website online.
Place the code for your favicon in the head section of your html in every page of your website. You’ll need to upload your image to your server then include the following line of code (enclosed in brackets) in your html:
LINK REL=”SHORTCUT ICON” HREF=”http://www.yourwebsite.com/favicon.ico”
That’s it. Now you have a favicon.
Is HTML Or A Content Management System Better For Web Design
You’ve decided to build a website to promote your business online. You don’t have a huge budget and you have limited technical skills. Should you build an HTML website or use a content management system?
There are pros and cons to doing it either way. But I’d say if you are a small business and you are on a tight budget then you might consider a content management system (CMS).
You are likely going to pay someone to set it up for you if you don’t have a lot of technical skills yourself. But you’d pay someone to design you a website using HTML as well. Either way, there’s an expense. And it costs about the same for HTML or a CMS design. The big difference, however, is in the ongoing maintenance.
With an HTML website, every time you want to update it you’d have to pay someone to update your website for you. It may not be much, but it’s an expense. With a CMS, once the initial set up is done, you can upload your content yourself. Just log in to the CMS and input your content. You can do that on your own and it won’t cost you a penny.
The only time a CMS will cost you is when performing routine maintenance or when fixing a periodic problem that requires technical skills you don’t have. Otherwise, ongoing expenses are less than for an HTML site.
Should You Design Your Website With HTML Or Use A CMS?
The question may come up for your company on whether or not you should hire a website designer to build you a site using HTML or whether you should use a content management system (CMS). Which is best for you?
Whether you design with HTML or use a CMS depends on a number of factors. Let’s start with how big a site you need. Do you need a large site or is a five-page portfolio all you need? If you are going to put up five pages and that’s that then you’ll probably do well just to build with HTML. It’s a quick down and dirty. But if you’re planning a larger site, say a couple hundred pages or more, then a CMS can be a great benefit.
Budget also plays into the factor. Got a large budget? Is the moon the limit? Then by all means, hire a fancy designer to do your site the right way. Can’t afford a great designer? Alright then, find one who will design you a site with CMS and teach you how to upload your own content.
Just one word of warning: If you do build with a CMS, make sure you configure it correctly. Some CMS systems do not crawl well and some will only crawl well if you set them up in a certain way. Dynamic pages, for instance, may see issues. And adding shopping carts and other third-party software to a CMS has its own issues. Just because the uploading of content is easy doesn’t mean that setting it up is easy.
A CMS can be a big time saver for companies that want to do a lot of their own, but don’t want to learn how to code with HTML. Some web design firms will work with you and teach you how to do some of your own uploading. You’ll just have to do your homework and do what is right for you.
Is Your Web Design W3C Compliant?
The World Wide Consortium, also called W3C, is an informal group of web professionals who are trying to establish standards for web design and other aspects of Internet marketing. While there are no rules for web design compliance, per se, it is a good idea to measure your web design according to W3C standards.
W3C implements its standards through recommendations. They are largely technical in nature and so far, since 1994 when it was started, the W3C has issued over 100 recommendations for the worldwide web.
One of W3Cs most recent recommendations is a best practices paper for mobile web applications. Some of the recommendations pertaining to mobile web applications include:
- Use Cookies Sparingly
- Inform the user about automatic network access
- Enable automatic sign-in
- Use transfer compression
- Avoid redirects
- Minimize external resources
- Cache AJAX data
- Offer users a choice of interfaces
These are just a few of the best practices recommended by W3C for mobile web applications and it’s just one example of the type of recommendations that the consortium makes to webmasters involved in web design and development. While there are no penalties for not complying with these recommendations, it is a good idea to check your web design against the W3C recommendations to ensure quality in web design and development.
How Hosting And Web Design Relate
Small business web design begins with web hosting. In order to have your own website you’ll need a web host, but not all hosts are created equal. Depending on your needs, you may want dedicated hosting or you could simply need shared hosting. Some small businesses find it beneficial to host their websites using cloud computing. Or you might benefit from a virtual dedicated server or a managed server. There are plenty of options when it comes to hosting and you’ll need to do your research.
Most small businesses just go to a host and pay based on price. But you should consider your business’s needs before deciding on a hosting plan. If all you want is a five-page business site that you build from an off-the-shelf template then the shared hosting plan is probably right for you. But if you have deeper security needs with a thousand page shopping cart, a blog, a forum, and several tiers of protected areas for members then a dedicated host is probably best for your business.
So what does hosting have to do with web design? The capabilities of your host are important to consider so that you can ensure that you get the right hosting product for your website based on its design and security features. If you need a consultant to help guide you through the web of hosting products then call us at Reciprocal Consulting.
Web Design: CSS Or Tables?
Is CSS or tables better for modern web design? You’ll find proponents of both today and many web designers still refuse to use CSS (though, admittedly, most have moved on to CSS). Then there are the new web designers who do their work completely in CSS without the use of tables. I believe it’s important to know how to do both.
There are advantages and disadvantages to both tables and CSS. With CSS, if you want to update your website then you only have to make changes once. Your CSS file define the elements and by making changes in your CSS file, or stylesheet, then you don’t have to do it on every page of your website. This is very important if you have a large website.
Tables, however, are easy to design once you know how. They’re fairly simple. You design the parameters of your table and input the data. Done.
So which should you use? I think it depends. CSS is good for defining page elements that are common to all of the pages on your website. That includes background color, sidebar width, navigation menu characteristics, etc. Those things won’t change from page to page so you want them to be constant. And if you do need to make changes to them it is best to do that in one file rather than having to do it manually on every page of your site.
A table, on the other hand, is best used whenever you have a design element that is unique to a specific page. For instance, in your body copy you are listing neighborhoods you service. You can put them in a table so that they stand out on the page and are set apart from the rest of your content. Easy to scan, easy to read.
When it comes to web design, there are few hard and fast rules. The one you want to pay attention to the most is to think of your site’s user. That’s who your design is for.
Are W3C Standards Necessary?
Spend any time at all on website design and you’ll quickly learn of an organization called W3C – or World Wide Web Corsortium. You’ll likely hear that using the W3C standards to build and design your website are necessary to ensure compatibility with current web standards. I hate to burst your bubble, but there’s no requirement to follow W3C standards.
That’s not to say that the W3C hasn’t benefited the Internet at all. Headed by the creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium does work hard to establish open lines of communication between webmasters and others who use the Internet. In fact, many of their suggestions are well worth listening to. But if you build a website that doesn’t comply with W3C standards, if you are using HTML code that can be read by browsers then you will likely build a website that is accessible by Internet users. You don’t need W3C approval.
The code that you’ll see at the top of some source code behind websites, you know that code that says your site is approved by W3C, it’s not really necessary. It is nice to have. It can build trust in your site. But if you’re missing it, no big deal. The real issue is to build a website that is accessible and provides your site visitors with benefits.
How Host Selection Affects Your Web Design Needs
When it comes to world-class web design, there is more to building a good web site than looking pretty. The elements are complicated, but how they work together makes all the difference. And there’s not just one right way to do it either.
One of the least often thought about aspects of web design is hosting. Sure, everyone thinks about it, of course. They choose a host and build a website and upload it to their host’s servers. But few webmasters actually sit and think about the hosting needs of their website. But the features of your web host are just as important for web design as they are anything else.
For starters, do you need a dedicated host or will a shared hosting plan suit your needs? To be sure, a dedicated server is more secure. It’s also more costly.
Then there’s the database support. Do you need a Windows server or a Linux server? Do you know the difference?
What about special needs for e-commerce accommodation or huge file storage such as videos and audio files? Are those necessary in your business plan?
It will behoove you to research the web hosting options you have available to you and compare them with your web design needs before you purchase your domain name and select a host. While you can always move to another host and repoint your DNS servers to that new host, you don’t want to do that if you can avoid it. It’s best to start out in your permanent home.
Is Your Web Design Costing You Rankings?
Web design, site structure and internal linking can all lead to problems that can ultimately affect your search rankings. A post on Bing’s Webmaster Center highlights the effect of poor design and what steps should be taken to ensure your web sites gains the most from your efforts.
There are times when the general theme coming from some blogs is that search engines are the enemy. In reality, if your site is providing valuable content then the search engines want it – they want to be able to tell the world about it. Rather than being the enemy, they can be a web site owners best friend. It’s simply matter of listening to what they want, how they want it presented and supplying it. As the Bing post stated:
….if your site’s structure is flawed or broken, then it will still not achieve the optimal page rank you desire from search engines.
It’s common sense. If the search engine bots cannot read certain pages – they won’t be indexed and if they are not indexed, they won’t appear in the search results.
Simply tasks like using Redirects when pages are moves; adding a Robots file to block out certain areas of your website that don’t need indexing; and providing clear and keyword targeted page and directory titles should be standard practice.
If you can ensure your site is easily spidered by the bots then you should find your pages being indexed. If pages are not being indexed, have a closer look to try and determine why. Find and fix the issue and you will reap the rewards through search traffic.
Web Design Tip: Don’t Overload With Information
You’ve heard that content is king and that is true, but you can go too far. One of the five common mistakes that many businesses make in their web design is providing too much information at once.
There are several ways you can provide too much information on your website:
- Too many irrelevant pages
- Too much information on a single page, making it too long to read
- Providing too much depth when giving an overview would do
- Elaborating on topics that need no elaboration
- Redundancy
- Duplicating content
- Adding irrelevant content to pages, watering down your SEO
Web design is very important. People will leave your site as often for a poor web design as they will anything else. An attractive site is very important to keep people interested. Even then, relevant content is what keeps visitors on your site and if you have too much irrelevant content or provide more than what people are willing to read through then you could be cutting off your own nose.
Before you build your site, learn a few web design basics. Don’t be a bore.