Tozzle is a web design and development quotation provider. Thousands of individuals and businesses, large and small, are creating their presence on the Internet every year in order to expand their reach or simply to provide their existing customers with a convenient way to keep up to date with the company and their products or services.
A well designed website with plenty of information about your business and products should also 'rank' highly on the search engines, meaning that your business will be exposed to brand new customers who are purposely seeking your products or services!
To get your free, no obligation web design quote, fill in our quick and easy form here! Otherwise, continue reading below to learn more about web design and search engine optimisation.
web design - a brief introduction
| "The intent of web design is to create a web site that presents content (including interactive features or interfaces) to the end user in the form of web pages. To create a successful website, however, so much more needs to be taken into consideration..." |
Creating a successful website design...
The first stage of any web design project is to visualise the design itself. It is easy enough to create an appealing design, but when designing for existing businesses, or projects, there is more often than not a brief to follow. Whether it is simply a company logo or a colour scheme, the design of the website must fit around the business image and content supplied. At this stage the website does not exist on the Internet and is only an image or a collection of images in specialist 'web design software'. Only when the designer is totally happy that the design fits the brief perfectly can the web design continue onto the next step; constructing the web design as web pages, most commonly using (x)HTML (HyperText Markup Language) code and CSS (cascading style sheets).
Web design considerations
There are many, many different factors to be taken into consideration before and during professional web design, for example:
- Prioritising information - what is the most important thing you want to tell the user, or potential customer, about yourself or your business? This needs to be clearly visible or accessible to the user on the home page.
- Content must be arranged in a clear and standardised manner - clear headings, paragraphs and sections to the website.
- Easy to use navigation - as with the content of the pages the website navigation should be designed to be intuitive, an essential part of good web design.
- The textual content should be inviting and easy to read - clearly readable and visible text takes priority over 'making it pretty'. Script typefaces may enhance the look of your website to you, but it could make it unreadable to the user.
- Vital information such as contact details (telephone number to place orders, e-mail address for enquiries etc) should be clearly accessible from anywhere on the website - text formatting, colour coding or icons can be used to highlight such items.
- Clutter-free design - simplify. Used correctly images can enhance a website. Used incorrectly, however, they can add distracting clutter to the website making it difficult to navigate and therefore frustrating to use.
These are just a small selection of the factors which have to be considered during the web design process in order to produce a successful and appealing website.
'Web Standards'
A set of best practices (or 'guidelines) for web coding and web design advocated by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to increase accessibility and consistency of web sites across browsers. Essentially they are to ensure that a website can be viewed across a wide range of hardware - which in business term means that your products & services can be viewed by the largest possible audience.
Web standard websites tend to rank higher up on search engines as in order to meet web standards the website must have valid 'code'. This means that the layout code and actual content are separate so that the search engine "robots" can 'scan' the page better and will therefore rank the page more highly than one which has invalid, and messy, code.
web design for business
Design for business
There are two main types of website widely used by businesses on the Internet today. Whether you are intending to utilise a flat, or static, website (generally used as a type of online 'brochure' or advert for your business) or an interactive e-commerce site, the overall look and feel will play an important role in its usability.
It is important that visitors to the site can quickly and easily access the required information. The web design should present the content in an intuitive manner, making effective use of colour, layout and site organisation. A cluttered and confusing website may frustrate a potential customer and force them to take their business to a competitor!
'Brochure' websites
'Brochure' websites are used by a business to present themselves on the Internet to provide any potential customers with more information about them in a favourable way. These websites can be any number of pages, depending on how much information the business wishes to display. Most brochure websites feature a home page and a contact page in order to ensure that any potential customers can quickly and easily see how to contact the business, and then any number of additional pages depending on the specific requirements of the business.
Most web design companies offer a wide variety of design packages for set prices, or custom designed websites to meet specific requirements.
eCommerce
| "Electronic commerce, commonly known as e-commerce or eCommerce, consists of the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet...the amount of trade conducted electronically has grown extraordinarily since the spread of the Internet." |
E-Commerce websites are for those who are interested in selling things on the Internet, they need to be designed and implemented by professional web designers and developers. However, once the website - or web shop - is up and running they can be used by anybody, as they have a very easy-to-use interface familiar to anybody with a basic grasp of modern computers and operating systems.
Businesses can sell almost everything and anything on an e-commerce website, using it as a complete shopping system or just as a shop window. Often businesses wish to have the best of both worlds and so have both a brochure and an e-commerce solution created for them as a complete package. The advantage of this is that a customers can read more information about the business before they are presented with the shop interface, this allows a business to present themselves to the customer in a more friendly and accessible fashion.
Accessibility Laws
| The Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (DDA) makes it illegal for a website provider to discriminate against a disabled person by refusing to provide a service that is generally available, providing a service of a lower standard, or failing to comply with a duty to make reasonable adjustments. |
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has produced a number of accepted guidelines, which are divided into three priorities:
- Priority 1 - websites must comply otherwise some users will find it impossible to access the site
- Priority 2 - websites should comply, otherwise some users will find it difficult to access the site
- Priority 3 - websites may comply, otherwise some users will find it somewhat difficult to access the site
The DDA requires a business to make "reasonable adjustments." The website developer must:
- Change a practice, policy or procedure that makes it impossible or unreasonably difficult for disabled people to use the service
- Provide an auxiliary aid or service if it would enable (or make it easier) for disabled people to use the service.
search engine optimisation (SEO)
| "The person you most want to find your website is the person who is searching for you!" |
Search Engine Optimisation encompasses a wide variety of tasks that improve a website's 'presence' on search engines. Maybe you've heard a few SEO catchphrases - meta tags, keyword density, or page rank - but you don't know exactly how to tie them all together to produce a website that appears at the top of the search engines for a specific search term.
Often referred to as "SEO", search engine optimisation is the process of arranging or displaying the content of a website in such a way so that search engines pick up on certain keywords, phrases and other content in order to display your website as a result for the appropriate search terms.
Just two reasons why 'SEO' has become an essential part of web design and development:
- A 2004 survey found that in business-to-business purchasing decisions, 63.9% of those surveyed stated that a search engine would be the first place they would go to research a product or service.
- Research conducted in 2005 by a search engine consulting firm showed that a top 10 ranking in Google (the most popular search engine in the world) increased the traffic of that website by up to five times its previous levels in the first month alone.
The entire process of a web search is text-based, even when the item being sought isn't text at all, like a picture or video file. The search engines care about how much text you have on your site, how it's formatted, and, of course, what it says. For this reason many web design firms shy away from creating "fancy" animated flash websites for businesses. Although these types of websites can look impressive, they are massively disadvantageous when it comes to showing up in search engines as they consist of mostly images which search engines do not pick up on as much as they do with chunks of relevant text.
However, this does not mean that a business should avoid putting plenty of nice images on a website to compliment the text throughout the pages as these can help to break up large chunks of text to make it more appealing to the customer. Images are not entirely useless when it comes to SEO either, professional web design firms ensure that all images on a website have what is known as "ALT image tags". These are primarily an accessibility feature which enables users who have issues with their vision can use tools which will read out this "ALT tag", telling the user what the image contains. From an SEO perspective these "tags" can also be used to insert more relative keywords, so long as it remains relative.