Online marketers understand the importance of getting top search engine rankings in major search engines. Therefore, they spend many time in optimizing website content. However, many of them ignore the fact that web design structure has a role in search engine optimization (SEO). To acquire high ranking, you cannot just rely on web designers because they could be good at web design but not good at SEO.

This article reveals several important web design elements you must consider during website optimization process.

1. CSS Stylesheet

It is good to use CSS stylesheet to format your web design because it can standardize the appearance of your website. For the sake of convenience, some web designers use internal CSS. It is no good! You should use external CSS stylesheet so that your HTML coding becomes consise, and mainly compose of your website content.  It is an essential SEO practice.

2. Content Management Software (CMS)

If you use CMS to manage your website, make sure your CMS provides these features:

a. Allows you to define different templates for different sections/pages. It gives you flexibility in optimizing website content.

b. Allows you to define Title and Meta tags for different web pages. Again, it gives you flexibility in optimizing every web page.

c. Allows you to generate static HTML pages instead of dynamic pages. Search engines are not good at reading dynamic web page. Accoding to Google webmaster guideline, Google may not index dynamic URL with more than 2 parameters within the URL.

If your web pages cannot get indexed, you definitely get no rankings no matter how many SEO effort you make.

3. HTML Code Compliance

As a good web design practice, make sure your HTML coding is compliant to some well recognized HTML standards such as W3C standard. Some search engine optimizers reported that non-compliant web design could cause difficulties for search engines to index and analyze your website. It hinders your website to get top search engine ranking.

4. Use of Graphics

You must optimize the file size of your images. As search engines like to read text, you should consider avoiding the use of graphics near top of your website, whenever it is possible.

5. Multiple-level Navigation Menu

Many websites use multiple-level navigation menu in Javascript.  However, the coding usually leaves in the HTML body. This is no good in terms of SEO. I recommend seperate Javascrpt from HTML coding by using external Javascript file. 

6. Bad Web Design

To make your web design search engine friendly, you must consider avoiding:

a. Use of frame. Search engines have difficulties to index all your frameset. Even though they can index some frame pages, users would only access to part of your webpages only in case they can find your website from search engines, e.g., only see a left-hand side navigation menu with a blank page on the right-hand side.

b. Re-direct techniques. For some reasons, web designers may make some re-direct pages or adopt Javascript re-direct techniques and re-direct visitors from one page to another content pages. Since search engine spammers usually use this technique, search engines could penalize your website.

7. Flash

Web designers may sell you to build a flash website or make a flash intro page as your home page. Their point is that flash makes your website more appealing and it would improve effectiveness of your website.  However, it is not always the case.

Visitors want to find information fast. Flash sometimes could make your website slow and require visitors to install plugins before they can see your website.  In terms of SEO, simply speaking, search engines treat flash as a graphic and cannot analyze content inside a flash file. The implication means a flash website is hard to get top search engine ranking.


Conclusion:

For small business to succeed online, you must strike a balance between SEO and fancy web design. A too fancy web design, in many cases, cannot give you any business as no one can find your website from search engines and if it annoys your visitors.

History

The concept of “Web 2.0″ began with a conference brainstorming session between O’Reilly and MediaLive International. Dale Dougherty, web pioneer and O’Reilly VP, noted that far from having crashed the web was more important than ever, with exciting new applications and sites popping up with surprising regularity. What’s more, the companies that had survived the collapse seemed to have some things in common. Could it be that the dot-com collapse marked some kind of turning point for the web, such that a call to action such as “Web 2.0″ might make sense? They agreed that it did, and so the Web 2.0 Conference was born.

The Web as Platform

Like many important concepts, Web 2.0 doesn’t have a hard boundary, but rather, a gravitational core. You can visualize Web 2.0 as a set of principles and practices that tie together a veritable solar system of sites that demonstrate some or all of those principles, at a varying distance from that core.

Web 1.0 vs. Web 2.0 AltaVista vs. Google Hotmail vs. Yahoo Mail Ofoto vs. Flicker Mp3.com vs. iTunes Geocities vs. Blogger MapQuest vs. Google Maps Encarta vs. Wikipedia Netscape vs. Firefox Open Data Open data formats No data lock-in or walled gardens User created data User owns their own data Ability to use data outside the confines of the application Data used across devices Architecture of Participation Providing a service, not a product (infoware not software) Encourage user contribution (reviews, comments) Collective intelligence (Page Rank, folksonomies, popularity) Make it easy to re-use and re-mix Customer self-service Community and sense of ownership Rich User Experience Easy to use Pleasurable to use Build social networks Rich user interface Functions like a traditional application Core Web 2.0 Technologies Open data through API’s and web services RSS Ajax Web Standards (DOM Scripting, XHTML, CSS) Web 2.0 Revolution Using existing technologies in new and innovative ways Change in the way people view the web More mature industry Healthier web economy Need to innovate just to maintain position The Web as a Platform Simplifies distribution Easy way of maintaining code Faster speed to market Share data across devices Subscription model vs. one off purchase

Web 2.0 refers to the supposed second generation of web technology. This means everything from blogs and Facebook to interactive flash based web design. With this new wave of web development and web design comes a whole new mess of tools and technology to exploit for your business. Lets survey some of the tools considered to be a part of web 2.0 and how they are used.

Social Networking – Your most common options here are Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, Twitter and possibly even LinkedIn for an ecommerce approach. These sites allow different people to exchange communication through the website and create “friendships” by making and accepting friend requests. How can this be valuable to your business? The logic here is to link businesses to consumers and consumers to businesses. If consumer B sees that consumer A is “friends” with or is interested in Business A, then consumer B is more likely to accept your company. It’s not always this simple as most users are turned off by an obvious ploy to get a consumer’s dollar. While this is sometimes difficult to achieve, this is where the most important 18-25 year olds are found so it is most likely worth the investment.

RSS Feeds – RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, feeds are basically the easiest way to upload frequently updated content such as blogs, news, articles, or audio/video. This gives your users a way to stay connected with your website and makes them feel connected to your business. If you are constantly posting fresh content that is valuable to your potential customers, they will want to stay up to date with what you have going on and if you give them the option to subscribe to your content as an RSS feed, it will only be easier for them.

Various widgets – There are many different Web 2.0 widgets and applications. One that almost every person has heard of and likely used is Google Maps. Countless companies are implementing Google’s brilliance on their websites and helping their potential customers find their place of business. “Bookmark This” is another good example of a popular widget. This is an application that allows you to create a button for users to share the content on your webpage, subscribe to the content, or simply bookmark it. For the record, these are just two of the countless tools out there for free. Search Google for web 2.0 applications or web 2.0 widgets. You won’t be disappointed.

Even though Web 2.0 can be complicated and overwhelming, it is just another part of our ever-changing technology that you are going to have to keep up with if you plan on keeping a good reputation. Social Networking, blogs, RSS feeds, and other tools are just some of the examples and there are always going to be more and more new developments to be a part of your business.

Webmasters and developers don’t need a whole lot of money to spend on tools in order to work efficiently and be productive. Here is a list of free tools that help me run my everyday webmaster chores.

Notepad++

Dreamweaver and such designing tools might have become very advanced in the recent years but I am still far from satisfied with them. I prefer to do the coding with a simple text editor and be in total control of the code and not end up with unnecessarily long code. Recently I discoverd Notepad++ which has the few bells and whistles that are desired by hard core programmers such as code highlighting, Regular Expression Search/Replace support, capability to extend functionality with plugins and nice depository of contributed ones. Worth your attention.

Filezilla

If you are like me and don’t use WYSIWYG editors to do your HTML/CSS designs then you are probably need or are already using a standalone FTP client to upload/download files to and from your server. Filezilla is a free tool that I have been using for some time and has not failed me. New version 3 has lots of new features, if you are FTPing stuff often maybe you should check it out.

Xampp

XAMPP is an apache server distribution that integrates php, mysql, phpmyadmin and a bunch of other great open source projects into an easy installation. It can be used on production servers to host one’s sites but I mostly use it locally to code and test my html/css/php projects. Its easier to develop locally because there is no need to upload files on servers everytime, and only upload when your project is complete. It can be installed on Windows/Linux and lots of other platforms and if you are serious about developing you should get it installed in your computer and start playing with it.

Google Analytics

Google analytics is a free website statistics package that anyone can easily integrate into their website in a few minutes. Analytics once installed on your website it gathers data and presents you with reports about which sites your visitors come from, what country they live in, how long they stayed on your site, which pages were more popular and a whole lot of reports that you will likely not need another statistics package for you site. Those statistics are vital to the progress of any site in order to understand a site’s audience and find things that might need to be improved. You can create as many analytics accounts as you like (unlimited number of sites) as long as your total pageviews don’t exceed the monthly allowance of 5 million.

Firefox

Mozilla Firefox is not only a great browser to surf with. Firefox was build with extensibility in mind and has given developers a way to extent its functionality with add-ons. Add-ons can enhance the capabilities of Firefox and enhance the browsing experience. There is a whole lot of add-ons in the Mozilla repository that can help you with task such as bookmarking, searching, social interaction, developing, news reading, downloading to name just a few categories. Some of the following favorite tools of mine are actually Mozilla Add-ons. Its definetelly worth your attention.

SeoQuake

Seoquake is a Mozilla add-on that was created with the SEO professionals in mind. It will help you gather important statistics about a website or web page with the touch of a button. Such statistics include PageRank, indexed pages, google backlinks, Cached date etc. One can also extend it/configure it to gather other important statistics from online services not already included in it.

Firebug

Firebug is yet another Mozilla Add-on; a webmaster tool that can help you understand and debug your javascripts. It has so many bells and whistles that I am thinking of devoting a whole article on it. I will just mention the features that I use myself; Inspecting and editing HTML and CSS on the fly, debugging and running javascript on the fly, monitor network activity but there are many others. Here is a video tutorial I recently found that will help you get started with firebug debugging

Gimp

Gimp is an open source image manipulation package that can help you with photo retouching, image composition, format conversion and animations among other things. Its not likely to replace adobe photoshop any time soon but its a free alternative that has found many followers and through its plugin architecture promises to built the only image manipulation tool you will ever need. Some of its features are presented in a way of a presentation but nothing can convince you better than to actually install it and try it on your own.

Drupal

Drupal is a content management system much like wordpress but a lot more extensible. WordPress is a good CMS (content management system) for simple sites and even though it has many plugins to extend its capabilities I would not recommend building anything other than a blog with it. Drupal on the other hand was built in such a way to be extensible. A programmer digging in its code will appreciate its flexibility, code quality, and modular design and simplicity for writing a new module. Drupal is was build from the ground up a tool for building community sites, and as a result it has many features to support such sites but it is also capable for supporting standard websites. Its learning curve is quite steep but it pays off in the end. Worth more than a look from you.

How will you accomplish the preferred functionality and look for your website? For a layman, this will be a dilemma that appears unassailable until he/she comes across open source customization. 

Open source customization involves tailoring open source content management system (CMS) or scripts like Joomla, WordPress, Oscommerce, Mambo and PHPBB to adorn the website with the choicest look and functionality. However, a layman can still not sail through open source customization until he/she has a good knowledge of PHP, CSS, and HTML. 

Open source Content Management Systems like WordPress and Joomla are of great use in modern techno-freak world. WordPress forms the most popular blogging platform, with many a people hosting their weblogs on this platform. With respect to the other blog platforms, it is relatively easier to publish and organize content on WordPress. Want to upload your favourite photos and videos for others to see. WordPress allows these and more. Many a users are now using this free-to-use platform to build websites. Besides WordPress blogs and websites are more user-friendly and SEO friendly, thanks to the host of in-built functionalities. 

Joomla is relatively tougher, but this award winning open source software allows you to build a seamless website without even messing with HTML, CSS or PHP. Another important advantage of using Joomla is that the website developer has a greater command on the look and feel of the website. Also one can try a whole spectrum of ways to view different parts of the website. Like plug-ins in WordPress, Joomla offers a host of components that can be downloaded for free and for a small charge on the internet. 

The obvious question then is what the need for customization is if these open source web based softwares are so sound and seamless. The answer is in the large number of benefits that can be had through open source customization. Want to have a contact form or an image slideshow on the website? Open source customization is the answer. Open source customization also offers browser compatibility so that the website looks consistent in whatever browser it is viewed. Whats’s more the website shows content uninterrupted in all screen sizes. 

That essays the role of customization in open source softwares. Now the website built on Joomla or WordPress is ready to be customized.There are two important parts which need to be considered while customization-Design part and Functionality part. The former defines how your website will look to the users. A large number of CMS have different files for design and programming. It is the style sheet in the theme folder where the design changes are to be made. In Joomla, look out for the template files that feature the content in the screen with preferred font colors, heading, list style and so on.

So, you have finally decided to build yourself a website, but really have no idea where to start. The following 10 steps will give you some insight into what you need to address when creating a search friendly website from the ground up.

While this article is not an exhaustive líst of everything you need to know, it does touch base on many of the important aspects of creating a new website.

Step 1 – Keyword Research
Even before you choose your domain name, you should put a little time into some keyword research. Research all the possible keywords that will fit your industry and the website you plan on building. Having a clear idea of what your end targets are will make the rest of your job much easier and help things to just fall into place. Take a look at Keyword Research for SEO, written earlier this summer, for more help on this.

Step 2 – Domain Selection
If you already have an established brick and mortar business and the website will be an extension of that business, using your company name as the domain name is in most cases the best idea. If your company name is either irrelevant, or simply unavailable, you may want to consider a domain that has your target phrase listed as part of the domain.

A great example of this is if your site is focused geographically. Using the location as part of the domain when possible will give you a little extra juice with the search engines and help draw people to your site as they instantly can see the relevance in the domain.

Let’s say that you are building a website focused on your home town, “Somewhere USA”. A domain you may consider could be “Somewhere.com”; however, this would probably be already taken. Other options such as “SomewhereInfo.com” or “SomewhereGuide.com” may be good alternatives. The same goes for retail stores. “SomewhereCameras”.com or “SomewhereBakery”.com would also be good choices.

Avoid excessive use of hyphens; sometimes it is appropriate to use one, but if you can help it, avoid more than that as it can appear messy and even spammy in some cases.

Step 3 – System Back End
If you plan on having a large scale website that will grow and change constantly then you may want to consider a content management system (CMS) such as Joomla. If you decide to go this route, you want to ensure that whichever CMS you choose is search engine friendly and offers items such as unique title tags, custom URL’s, and full control over content, heading tags, image alt tags, etc.

Starting a website using a non-friendly CMS is like buying a car without an engine. Sure it may look great, but it won’t get you anywhere.

Step 4 – Site Structure & Navigation
This is really one of the most fundamental aspects of your site creation. If the structure of your site does not work well, then your site may be doomed from the very beginning.

Take a look back at your keyword research and brainstorm all the areas of your site that you may want to develop content for. In some cases you may find valuable keywords that would fit perfectly into a few pages of content for your site. If the phrase and the content would be a good match for the theme of your site, go ahead and note them as pages to create. Get a líst, or flowchart, of all the content you plan on adding and sort those pages into relevant categories.

Be sure your site files are saved in a way that makes sense – this includes both the file name, and the complete path to the file. Save files, including similar content in a relevant subdirectory, with simple file names representing each. Let’s take an example of an informational site dedicated to a specific geographic location. If you have a series of pages dedicated to recreation, you may save them as:

/recreation/parks.html
/recreation/trails.html
/recreation/beaches.html

Keeping your URL structure clean and tidy can not only help with search engine rankings, but it will give a good visual impression to the site visitor as well. Often, using each of these categories as main points for your primary site navigation may make the most sense.

Also be sure to keep your site relatively flat, with as few layers as possible. Don’t make the search engines follow a dozen links to get to the deepest levels of your site. Unless the site is literally tens of thousands of pages, there is no need to click more than 2 or 3 links to get to any deep content. The shorter the path to an internal page, the more credít by the search engines.

Step 5 – Navigation
When developing the end site, you also want to make sure that your site navigation is search engine friendly – this is critical if you ever want free organic listings.

If possible, use a text based form of navigation. You can use CSS to style the text links to fit into your graphical design. Text links are the best method, but image based navigation and even some forms of drop down menus are also search engine friendly.

If you choose to use image based navigation be sure to include image alt text relevant to the link to give something for Google to associate with the linked page. If you absolutely must use Flash, or any form of navigation not friendly for search engine spiders, be sure to supplement this with text based links on another location of the page.

Step 6 – Analytics
It isn’t ever too early to start thinking about your stats. Before your site goes live you must have some form of accurate analytics in place so you can measure your site’s traffic and progress.

There is an endless supply of analytics options out there to choose from. You can simply use the stats software that comes free with your web hosting, however, more often than not, they tend to be very basic with no flexibility. Advanced choices such as ClickTracks can give you rather in-depth statistics, but for a very small mom and pop operation it may be too expensive. Google Analytics, is a free option that can give you most, if not all the data you will need and does not require access to your raw log files.

If you do opt for an option such as ClickTracks, check with your host to ensure that you will have the raw log files you require. StepForth can also help you with your statistical analysis and offers a number of inexpensive ClickTracks service packages.

Step 7 – Content Creation
Now is the time to get that new, fresh content posted to your site with the SEO in mind. Make sure that the content you write reflects your industry and target keywords. You don’t need to flood the content with your target keywords, but make sure they are in there a few times. When it makes sense to do so, also include some acronyms to help Google establish the overall relevance.

If you perform a search in Google for “~keyword”, any words that Google bolds in the search results will be acronyms that Google deems relevant. Include some of these where possible.

Step 8 – Basic SEO
Ensure that ALL pages of your site include unique and Meta Description tags. This is one of the core fundamental aspects of an optimized size and it does play a significant role in your search rankings. Make sure that these tags are not only unique but are accurate representations of each page. Also be sure to place your target phrase in heading as well as image alt tags where applicable.

Step 9 – Initial Promotion / Launch
Now that you have your new site all up and ready to go, you want to give it that kick start to help drive some traffic. It will be a while before the search engines fully index your site and even longer before you start to see organic rankings for your target search phrases. It is important to start off right away to get the ball rolling.

Start off by issuing a press release to announce the launch of your new business website. Press releases are a great way to get some traffic and a rather valuable first link into your site. Submitting your press release using a company such as PRWeb will get your link in the engine’s path and should help your site to be initially indexed by Google right away.

Next submít your site to some relevant directories starting with DMOZ. It can take months, even years, to have your site listed in DMOZ, so it is important to get it submitted right away. Consider submittíng to other industry relevant directories. For some information on how to select the right directories take a look at Building Links with Directory Submissions.

Work on getting as many links from relevant industry websites as possible. The more links you can get from reputable sources, the better the overall performance of your site.

Step 10 – Ongoing Promotion
Once you have completed the site, the content looks great, and all appears finished, you’ve still got work to do. For long term success, especially for a brand new site, you need to continually promote your site. You should always be looking at ways to build your inbound links and your relevant content.

Consider creating accounts with various social media platforms to help promote your site. These can not only give you a link back to your site, but they can help you drive traffic and raise awareness about your business and product.

A site that is always growing, and always getting new links, has the best chance of getting a stable top 10 listing in Google

Website is an online way of presenting a story and history about a company, its developments, its futuristic goals and above all the overall working strategies. World over, businesses are changing their strategies and exploring newer domains. Therefore, it becomes important in such a dynamically moving world, to have an ideal website that serves a mastermind to make the business processes move in a streamlined fashion, down through the hierarchy.

The need for corporate website also becomes instrumental in the present technology driven world, where businesses are being practically run over the internet. These businesses employ massive internet marketing stunts including article marketing, blog posting and SEO. With the development of powerful content management system (CMS) tools, the virtual publicity has received massive impetus, and the big corporate houses have seen a rapid growth in their development.

The websites for corporate are being ideally designed taking into account the nature of audience, the key domain areas, and the expanse of the business. Many big companies have already forayed into strategies, whereby, they are using the power of internet to boost their sales graphs. Corporate also take the advantage of full service website design features to keep their products and services inventory up to date.

Web solution companies are also offering graphic design, Flash, JavaScript, Perl, CGI, CSS, HTML and (X) HTML website features to add brand new functionalities to the business websites. The best part of any corporate website design is that it is simple, functionally rich and database rich. Furthermore, as the part of corporate web design package, there are several corporate re-design websites projects that are undertaken by the website development companies.

Truly speaking, a corporate website for the business purpose is a complete and comprehensive solution that have made businesses run online and maximized ROIs.

CMS or Content-Management System is an application which can be very beneficial for SEO. A CMS, or in this case WCMS (Web CMS), is a software usually implemented as a Web application, for creating and managing HTML content. It is used to manage and control a large, dynamic collection of Web material (HTML documents and their associated images). A WCMS facilitates content creation, content control, editing, and many essential Web maintenance functions.

Different SEO specialists and consultants have come to use CMS applications to easily and conveniently make several changes within a website that would help in their SEO campaigns such as the use of Meta tags, Alt Tags, Title tags, and more. This also saves from asking an already busy web developer for making changes in a web page. But the question now is, which CMS is the best. There are, however, too many CMS softwares to go around, thus usually brings the question on which of these CMS’ are the best when it comes to SEO. After doing some research on which is the best when it comes to CMS for SEO, there are several names that came up from the list of prospectives. These names include:

Joomla!

Joomla! is considered by many as one of the most use-friendly CMS used not only for SEO, but also for other web-based applications. So what is Joomla!? Joomla! is a free open source content management system for publishing content on the World Wide Web and intranets as well as a Model–view–controller (MVC) Web Application Development framework. According to several SEO Philippines consultants, the system includes features such as page caching to improve performance, RSS feeds, printable versions of pages, news flashes, blogs, polls, website searching, and language internationalization.

Popular features: The Joomla! package consists of many different parts, which allow modular extensions and integrations to be made easily. These includes “Plugins”, “Components”, and “Modules”.

Plugins are background extensions that extend Joomla! with new functionality. The WikiBot, for example, allows the author of Joomla! content to use “Wikitags” in Joomla! articles which will auto-create dynamic hyperlinks to Wikipedia articles when displayed. There are over 4,000 extensions for Joomla! available via the Extensions Directory.

Components allow webmasters to perform such tasks as build a community by expanding user features, backup a website, translate content and create URLs that are more friendly to search engines.

Modules perform such tasks as displaying a calendar or allowing custom code like Google AdSense etc., to be inserted within the base Joomla! code.

Drupal

Drupal, like Joomla!, is used as a back-end system for many different types of websites, ranging from small personal blogs to large corporate and political sites. SEO consultants have made several use of Drupal when it comes managing a website to set it up for On-Page SEO.

The standard release of Drupal, known as Drupal core, contains basic features common to most CMSs. According to SEO Philippines consultants, these include the ability to register and maintain individual user accounts, administration menus, RSS-feeds, customizable layout, flexible account privileges, logging, a blogging system, an Internet forum, and options to create a classic brochureware website or an interactive community website. SEO specialists and consultants made use of Drupal when it was designed to allow new features and custom behavior to be added by third parties, which in this case several features used for SEO. For this reason, Drupal is sometimes described as a content management framework. The good thing about Drupal is that although it offers a sophisticated programming interface for developers, no programming skills are required for basic website installation and administration.

SilverStripe

Another great CMS for SEO is SilverStripe. SilverStripe is a free and open source content management system (CMS) for creating and maintaining websites. The CMS provides a web-based administration panel that enables users to make modifications to parts of the website. This panel includes a WYSIWYG website editor. Notable features of the SilverStripe CMS include:

A modern, extensible web-application interface Drag and drop customization of tree-based navigation structure Customizable output markup with CSS-based, table-free defaults Work-flow management:Draft/Published separation through content staging, and document revision control/rollback with ‘compare’ functionality Highly configurable security/permissions model Data object model, automatic database schema generation, and a suite of CMS data controls to enable easy customization of inputs. asset management and image resizing Multiple templates per page Search engine friendly URLs, meta-data management, and automatic XML sitemap generation Full text search and RSS feeds Optimizations for heavy loads (e.g. manual cache refresh) Internationalization/Languages: SilverStripe supports multiple-language content. UTF-8 and the internationalization of character sets are supported.

WordPress

Although not as popularly used for SEO compared to those mention above, many still use WordPress for SEO purposes. WordPress has a templating system, which includes widgets that can be rearranged without editing PHP or HTML code, as well as themes that can be installed and switched between. The PHP and HTML code in themes can also be edited for more advanced customizations. According to several SEO Philippines consultants that use the application, WordPress also features integrated link management; a search engine-friendly, clean permalink structure; the ability to assign nested, multiple categories to articles; multiple author capability; and support for tagging of posts and articles. Automatic filters that provide for proper formatting and styling of text in articles (for example, converting regular quotes to smart quotes) are also included. WordPress supports the Trackback and Pingback standards for displaying links to other sites that have themselves linked to a post or article. Finally, WordPress has a rich plugin architecture which allows users and developers to extend its functionality beyond the features that come as part of the base install.

Website design is a very important aspect responsible for bringing in traffic to your website and helping your business to succeed. After all, the design of your website is everything which represents your business to the visitors assessing your site. Therefore, your website design should have a professional look, the pages should be formatted systematically and its content should be relevant to your business, so that it can keep the visitor engaged. 

You might have a lot of information about the different website design tools such as DHTML, HTML, PHP, CSS, CMS etc. But you need to take the help of expert website designers to combine all these tools in the most efficient style for your website.

The website design companies strategically plan out the design of the websites, according to the business requirements, and then implement the design in the best possible way. There are certain principles which the designers follow to keep the visitors engaged in the website, till they take a positive action.

Some of the common website designing techniques used by the designers are:

Crisp and fresh content with a catchy headline:

The designers try to make the headlines as attractive as possible with the usage of different features, so that it can draw the attention of the visitors. They use crisp, fresh and informative content so that the visitors find it interesting and surf through every page of the website. They use content which is relevant to the theme of the page. The content is supported with a proper layout and relevant elements like audio, video and images. However, they avoid using heavy tools so that the pages do not take long time to open.

User friendly design and easy navigations:

The designers make the designs user friendly and use easy navigations so that the visitors do not get confused. They find the ‘Hot Spots’ of every page and use the navigations strategically. Hot Spots are the portions of the pages which draw the attention of visitors, the most. The designers very carefully plan the layout and positioning of every page, so that all important information is passed on to the visitors efficiently.

The websites are designed in a manner that website optimization is not a problem and links can be provided easily from the texts. Therefore, the designers also keep optimization options in mind while designing a site.

Use pleasing backgrounds, fonts and colors:

The designers use the most pleasing backgrounds, fonts and colors, matching the theme of the website. They try to use the selected colors in the most appealing manner. The colors are selected keeping the target market in mind.

Hold the visitor and give them a reason to return back:

More traffic always does not mean more business. But a good traffic is obviously required for business growth. The designers make sure that the website pages contain information which can force the visitors to return back to the website for business. To get more traffic, it is also important to be visible on the search engines. Therefore, it is essential to get a website optimized. But the key factor to get potential traffic is to keep things simple but informative.

Get the website optimized:

It is equally important for a website to be ranked high on a search engine, as it is, to look good. For website optimization, the websites are passed on to the SEO experts from the designers, for the finishing touch.

Once the website design and website optimization is completed, the websites are ready to get positive results for business organizations.

Website design has slowly become in the last couple of years or so, an important aspect that drives online visibility. Now if you are starting a new business then you will require a website because it acts as your visiting or business card over the internet. A website is also considered to be an online portfolio or catalogue of services, products and other valuable information for visitors who scan the internet to suffice their requirements.

Now there are two types of web design that you can choose from. You can either visit websites to download already designed template or get custom website design Chicago.  You are probably asking what difference it will make. If you download templates from external websites then you will get only the homepage or index page and another internal page with HTML or any basic code. But what about the rest of the pages? If you need to make a website that has more than 100 pages, a shopping cart, a forum, an administrator console, and a CMS system then how can you get it done? This is where custom website design Chicago comes in.

For custom website design Chicago, you can either hire a website design company or an independent website designer. The fact of the matter is that customized website design will include all your requirements and even concepts. There are 5 factors that play an important role in custom website design Chicago and they are:

Layout:

The layout of the website should be based on the W3C standard and can follow the web 1.0 or web 2.0 formats. Web 1.0 format is considered to be a thing of the past but it is still as effective.  

Design Elements:

There are hundreds of design elements that can be incorporated into a website but only a few of high importance. You can design your website in flash or keep it simple textual-image based. Flash means that your website will not get indexed by search engines and hence have a low ranking but will look impressive. On the other hand, simple HTML-CSS or PhP website will fulfill the SEO prerequisites and help your website to get a high rank. Another important design element is the navigation. The navigation should be clean and simple. Avoid extensive drop down lists or secondary navigations. If you have one primary navigation then that will be good enough.

Branding:

Branding is an important aspect and this normally refers to use of the logo. How and where on the layout you display your company logo matters. How simple and artistic your logo is will define how meaningful it is. One of the important things is that your logo should be in-sync with the company’s vision or what the company is all about and is always preferred to an abstract design.

Images and content:

How you display images and content is an important aspect of custom website design Chicago. The best option is to have minimum images and maximum content unless you want a travel website or a merchant website.