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Following on from my Content is King post, this piece will talk about the importance of getting some good quality content onto your site.
Good design will hook a visitors short term attention, but you have to back it up with some decent quality, highly visible text that will help let visitors know what you are about and what your site has to offer them.
If it takes a visitor more than 20 seconds to work out exactly what they can get out of your site the chances are that they will navigate away. As such, your text must be concise and to the point but still have enough detail to give your product/service an enticing feel.
The benefits of good copy are not restricted to your visitors, well laid out copy that is rich in keywords will help towards your S.E. rankings but again, getting the balance is important, if you just cram as much keyword repetition into your text it won’t read properly and the benefit from additional rankings will be wasted when visitors leave your site because they cant understand the text. Read more about content v SEO here.
Make sure that all your text is written in prose and that your font style, size and colour is legible. The last thing you want is for your page to look like it was written by a 6-year-old and if you write in capitals, use crazy colours and text, thats exactly what it will look like, even if the content itself is quite good. Have a look here to see what I mean.
Some schoolboy errors for poor web text would be not putting enough description in your product blurbs, not explaining your services well enough or, conversely, using way too much detail and losing the interest of your visitors, spelling mistakes are basic and grammar should usually be proper, though sometimes this depends on your target audience. Stay away from some of these and you are looking at a fairly decent piece of web copy.
I recently found the blog of Joshua Clanton. You might want to check it out, like me he likes to sing the praises of content over design.
Thats not to say that we don’t appreciate good design when we see it, but more that we can understand that the majority of sites have a role to play and that it is all too easy for a site’s designer to get caught up in good aesthetics rather than making sure that the design optimises the sites’ performance.
Anyway, its a great blog with some great pieces, take a look.
No matter how good your point is, its never good enough.
Did you ever get the feeling that no matter how hard you tried, no-one was listening to your opinion? Blogs can be much the same. It is very easy to mis-read / mis-interpret a post or to simply miss the point entirely. Sometimes people get the point, but choose to ignore it and argue relentlessly nevertheless. I guess some people are just like that.
Read the rest of this entry »
1. A Pro Will Do It Within A Timescale.
Professional web design firms will often state a timescale within which your site will be finished. Getting a friend to do your site often means getting it done ‘in spare time’ which means you could be waiting a lot longer for your site to be finished. Read the rest of this entry »
As a web designer and having experience in B2B lead generation for web designers, I find it increasingly frustrating when clients come looking for web design services without really having looked into budgets properly.
Now, I’m not suggesting that everyone has to spend £450,000 on a design (unlike the 2012 Olympic logo), however, it seems that many small and medium sized businesses greatly under estimate the cost, and value, of a well designed web presence.
A £500 budget is all well and good for a small brochure site, but for anything more than that (and lets face it, with business sites there is SO much more that you can do) you are probably looking at something in the region of 1k plus.
For example; recently we had an enquiry from someone who wanted to setup a website to sell various pieces of art from various artists. Now if the pages were static with simple images of the product and a number to call to purchase, the budget of £500 is looking reasonable. But they wanted a cart system, a database for all the products, visitor and artist logins and a tracking system to work out commission for each artist etc.
Is it just me or do clients genuinely believe that they can still get a professional job done for less than £500? Perhaps its because people still don’t value the potential a website has for their business or perhaps I’m just being cynical.
Whatever it is - you can’t have that website for £500. OK?
As many SEO’s, out there know, trying to optimise existing sites can be a real pain, especially when the client is adamant that the design and layout of the pages remain untouched. Thankfully more and more people these days are including SEO experts in the earlier stages of the website development, process.
Ross Dunn is one of many SEO experts to comment on the massive benefits that can be gained from involving SEO advisors as well as designers and internal business process staff in the early stages of the creating of your site. Dunn’s article on involving an SEO in the design process explains many of the advantages that thinking ahead like this can give you. Scott Clark has also written a great piece about this, which I recommend you read.
All too often in the past, clients of web designers used to rush into getting a web presence, and consequently did not take the time and effort to go through a proper consultation process. Now clients see a web presence as less of a status symbol and more of a genuine opportunity, to open up a whole new sector and target for their market.
Getting the balance of SEO and design, into the structure of the site itself is difficult enough without having to chop and change it in future to meet various ranking and business requirements. This is why having all parties involved in creation of the site meet up at a number of times during its development make more sense than getting in a company to fiddle around with someone elses work (don’t forget some of us designers are proud of our work!).
Lets not forget that poor planning, means you may miss out business opportunities.
Websites have more use than just static advertising and e-commerce; you could use your website as a medium for resource sharing between remote branches/offices, databases, CRM, CMS among many other features. You really do need to make sure that your site specification is all in place before you start moving forward. Your designer and SEO can often help you with this as they know the capabilities of web technology, make sure you take their advice onboard. It doesn’t matter if this changes your plans at this stage, it will prevent problems arising from changing your specification midway through, or worse, after the site is finished and live.
Once you have got all the consultation and specifications sorted you can feel relaxed in the knowledge that once your site is finished it will have all the functions in place, a good SEO framework integrated within a design which you are happy with. The great thing about being prepared like this is that it was all done without having to run around between designer and SEO and you wont have to pay anything extra for corrective work that could have been avoided.
Your SEO is likely to be working with you and your site for a long time so just remember that it is best to keep a good working relationship with them by not making their lives difficult in the early stages of development!
If you’ve been following any kind of tech news this week, you’ll probably be aware that Microsoft have bid $44.6 billion for their internet rivals, Yahoo.
While many analysts feel this is way above the real worth of Yahoo and the shareholders are rubbing their hands with glee, there seems to be one small fact that has been forgotten.
That is: Yahoo own a stake in Google. Despite selling a chunk of their shares in August 2004, as far as I can see Yahoo still owns plenty of stock in Google.
Microsoft buying Yahoo would effectively mean that Bill Gates’ company will own a stake in Google.
How the guys at the Googleplex would feel about this isn’t recorded, but I think we can guess.
I recently found this article which highlighted some of the most common mistakes with SEO projects. While it explains SEO in its more basic forms, it is based in firm princpals which can act as a very useful guide for beginners and more experienced SEOs.
However, it also raises points that affect not only SEO but also general web design. As I have written in a previous post, getting the right balance between Design and SEO is key not only to visitor retention, but also to rankings themselves. Many designers and search engine optimisers overlook the balance between design and search engine optimisation.
It is good to see there are still people out there that advocate keeping sites simple as the way forward!
Isn’t it becoming scary that no matter what you seem to search for on Google these days, Wikipedia is the #1 expert and has all the answers you are looking for?
Search Google for information on Pathology, apparently Wikipedia is more relevant than the Royal College of Pathologists.
Search Google for information on Presidential Elections, Wikipedia is more relevant than official news sites and sites for the Democratic Party & the Republican party.
You’ll find the same for Chicked Fried Steak, Wikipedia can tell you what it is, but Recipe and general interest sites dedicated to it are all somehow judged to be of less relevance. Even if you are searching for information about Cancer, Wikipedia is the #1 result.
While Wikipedia and other Web 2.0 sites can provide a wide variety of information and can draw from a vast knowledge base, the content can often be biased or inaccurate to a varied extent. When you are searching for this information in an academic context, such as in a topical journals or publications, you know what to expect and you formulate your own opinion on that work because you know that it is based on one person or organisation’s work.
However, when Joe Blogs is looking for an answer in Google, nine times out of ten he will take the info provided in the first result as a given. This isn’t a problem if the first result is a reputable and respected site written by knowledgeable professionals. The problem arises when the #1 result is a Wiki page that could have been written by absolutely anyone. Don’t get me wrong, for the most part the information is often generally correct, but there is so much room for error, it is hard to know when to accept or contest what is written without going to a genuinely knowledgeable source (In which case, why is this site not the top listing).
Let’s not forget that dedicated sites also contain more information, better references and, depending on the topic, can also provide a broader spectrum of related information.
So if Wikipedia and the like don’t contain the most relevant, most respectable and most complete information on your search terms, why do Google rank it in the top 3 consistently?
Wikipedia is condered an authority site by Google due to the huge amount of links it has generated both internally and externally. It also had a huge content base which spans many thousands of pages and covers pretty much any topics you can imagine (as well as some you can’t). The authority status given by Google has resulted in unusually large pagerank filtering down to the individual pages giving a false impression of importance.
So while Wikipedia may be a good general source of information, it is not the authority site for the majority of the topics it covers, though this is not reflected by the high rankings its pages receive.
Tanner Christensen has written an interesting article which raises the issue of people taking what is written on the internet for granted.
If Tanner is right, this means that people are taking the first result of their Google search and basing their knowledge on what they read. If that first result is a Wikipedia page written by Joe Bloggs who is no more qualified to write about it than the next random person we have a problem.
Is Google’s ranking of Wikipedia the problem or are the users to blame? Perhaps the Wiki contributers are to blame? Or is there any problem with this at all? What do you think?
John Krycek has written an interesting article highlighting the problems that arise when SEO and Design are not both integrated during the design of a website.
He raises some interesting issues on the individual importance of SEO and Aesthetic Design as well as the pitfalls of failing to address one of these two issues. One of the more important issues he raises is that of knowing exactly what you are designing the site for in the first place.
Recognising exactly what you are designing your site for is often overlooked by many people, especially those who have not got web experience (i.e. company directors etc). Krycek’s article successfully points out how stripping down a site to the bare necessities can often help determine what the site really needs in order to meet its objectives for being.
Rather than getting caught up in flashy designs or unreasable SEO-friendly copy, it pays to think about your target audience and how they will reach your site and react when (or if) they get there. Getting the balance is important, though making sure that the site can actually do what you really need it to is just as paramount in its importance.