Creating A Webpage - Web
Design Preparation
Ok, you have agreed objectives for the new Website, decided on the look and feel and number of pages required. The next step, is to review the overall structure for the web site before creating your first Webpage.
Website Design Tips For Small Websites
If your Website is ten pages or less, one of the best tips, is to keep the design of your Website as simple as possible. By this, we mean, having a single Navigation Bar similar to the main one at the top of this page. This makes navigating your web site much more intuitive for the visitor and all pages are only one click away.
How To Create A Webpage For Bigger Web Sites
If your web site is going to have twenty pages or more, it would not be practical to create all the Webpages in one Navigation Bar. In this scenario, you should be looking to create sub-menus, similar to the mini-nav-bar to the left of this text or the larger one to the left of that. Apart from making navigation much simpler for your site visitors, it gives more opportunities to optimise your web site for Search Engines. This is discussed in more detail, below.
Create A Good Navigation Structure
To improve the structure of your Website further, you may want to consider creating sub-directories to simplify management of the website. For example, this website has a sub-directory for Web Design, www.theholtpartnership.co.uk/web_design. As above, this approach can also have a positive influence on Search Engines.
Flexibility
For both small and larger Websites, it is important to build flexibility into your design and give visitors, options, how they want to use your Website. Not only will this make their web visit more enjoyable, it gives an opportunity to influence their navigation without it being too obvious.
Website Optimization - Engine Matching Results Search
Since, it does not require any additional work for the Web Designer and may have an impact on Engine matching results, it is prudent to make your Website, Search Engine friendly from the outset. To do this, it is advisable to incorporate as many keywords and search phrases, relevant to your industry, in all aspects of Website design. View it as, the sum of the parts!
What Are Keywords?
Keywords are what potential clients enter into Search Engines when looking for your particular service. If you were looking for an Accountant in Hertfordshire, for example, you may enter the search "accountants hertfordshire". Alternatively, if you were looking for a competitively priced Mobile Phone, you may enter the search "low cost mobile phones".
When developing your Website, it is important to spend a significant amount of time researching what keyword phrases are being used in your industry. They represent the foundations of your entire Website.
Thinking Like Your Website Visitors
The best approach, is simply to put yourself in the shoes of the Web Surfer and try and second guess what they will be searching on. Alternatively, you can subscribe to a tool used by Web Designers, Wordtracker. For a small fee, this tool can help create key phrases, tells you how many people used them and how many competitive Websites use the same phrase. Wordtracker can be found at the following link, www.wordtracker.com
Domain Name
As we mentioned in the Domain Name section of this article, the optimization process can start with the Domain Name. If you were an Accountant based in Hertfordshire, you may wish to use www.hertfordshire-accountants.co.uk (if it is available). The hyphen allows the Search Engine to distinguish between the two words.
Page URLs
The next logical step, is to look at page URLs, given to each page on your Website. Taking the Accountant example, again, if you had a page that described your Bookkeeping services, naming it www.yourcompanyname.co.uk/bookkeeping.htm is more preferable to www.yourcompanyname.co.uk/page1. Apart from helping the visitor know what page they are on, it gives, Search Engines, clues regarding page content.
Page Titles
At the top of every page on this Website, you can read a brief summary of each page. Although, this can be helpful to your visitors, experienced Web Design companies use it to influence Search Engines. The idea, is to include as many of your keywords in the title, relevant to the web page you are creating. Search Engines look for keywords in Page Titles and compare them to written content in the body of the page. If they match, you have a greater chance of earning valuable page rank points.
Some common mistakes are: using the same page title in all pages; a lack of keywords in the title; using irrelevant words and superlatives such as "The UK's number one...."; including the company name on all page titles.
Page Description
Some Search Engines show hidden descriptions of Web pages when returning search results. Others prefer to use content from the page body. In the past, it was common knowledge amongst Web Designers, that page descriptions could be used to influence Search results by including key search phrases within the description.
Although, many Web Designers, now believe it is not as important as it once was, many still include it in their web designs. Search Engines are always changing their Algorithms and it is possible they may, once again, put greater emphasis on page descriptions.
Next: More Good Tecnical Web Design Tips
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