The 6 Golden Rules of Website Design

So you want a new website – great! But before you engage the services of a web designer and part with your hard-earned cash, consider a few points:

1. Will your new website look professional?
2. Is your content interesting to visitors?
3. Will your content encourage visitors to take action?
4. Will the search engines be able to read the pages?
5. Will the search engines consider your pages important?
6. What kind of return on investment are you likely to get?

Now let’s look at each of those in more detail…

1. Will your new website look professional?

Most professional web designers have got this one covered. The vast majority of them produce websites that look good. If in doubt, ask to see some of their previous work.

2. Is your content interesting to visitors?

Many web designers leave the text element of this to the client (you). Are you confident that you can you write content that is both informative and interesting to your potential visitors? The text your website contains can make the difference between visitors stopping to look around, taking a specific action, or just leaving in a hurry. Writing copy (marketing text) is a skilled job – it is as important as the look of your website. So make sure that either you, or your web designer can write good copy.

3. Will your content encourage visitors to take action?

If I visit your website, and I like the look of it, and then I read what you have written without getting bored, what will I do next? Will I leave? Will I place an order? Will I telephone or email you? Do you know how to encourage your website visitors to take action? Does your web designer? Make sure that your website content encourages visitors to contact you or make a purchase. If you don’t know how to do this, be sure that your web designer does.

4. Will the search engines be able to read your pages?

Imagine your brand new website is up and running. When the search engines’ spiders come visiting, what will they find? Will they find structure and content they can understand and index with ease? Will they find elements they cannot read or understand? Perhaps ‘Flash’ pages or pictures with no Alt Tags to explain them?

The worst web page I have ever seen was a one where the entire text for the page was contained within a picture file, thus rendering every single word invisible to the search engines!

3 musts here are:

1. Text should be text.
2. Images should have proper ALT TAGS to describe them properly to search engines.
3. Flash files should be avoided wherever possible because they are virtually invisible to search engines.

If your web designer disagrees with these 3 points, or even worse, doesn’t understand them, they simply have no idea what they are doing. But don’t take my word for it – read Google’s webmaster guidelines for yourself and get the facts from the horse’s mouth.

5. Will the search engines consider your pages important?

Search engines, especially Google (which is the biggest by far), want content. If your site contains unique, fresh and informative content, you are already on the right track.

They also want regularly updated content, which is why blogs (like this one you’re reading) are such a good idea.

Search engines want content that is focussed on a particular subject rather than wandering off at tangents because this means that it is likely to be interesting to readers who are searching for something specific.

Finally they want honesty. If your site has hidden text, elements that their spiders cannot read, cloaked links, secretly downloads nasty files, or generally claims to be something that it isn’t, the search engines will see straight through your deceit.

Remember, their business is delivering high quality search results to users, so if you try to deceive them, expect to be penalised. Conversely, if you deliver good, unique, fresh and new content in a well structured way, expect them to like it and promote your site more as a result.

Making your structure and content ‘search engine friendly’ amounts to free advertising on search engines – and if that content is also interesting to your visitors, you are highly likely to get real results from your new website.

6. What kind of return on investment are you likely to get?

Websites that encompass all of the positive elements mentioned above will get more visitors over longer periods of time. More visitors to a website which has good content and encourages those visitors to take action, means more enquiries, leads and sales – you do the maths. 

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