Our Approach, Websites
| 16 January 2010
The Web Production Process
Web design and development practices have evolved towards placing more emphasis on usability, fast loading pages, and good quality, content rich Web pages. This is done to ensure that anyone browsing a website enjoys a positive experience while visiting the website, increasing the opportunity for better ROI. This article will outline the steps that should be taken when creating and implementing an effective, efficient and creatively unique product while maintaining the proper steps involved in designing and implementing the best possible product.
One of the most common issues Web designers encounter is the necessary balance of graphics to straight HTML/Text/CSS. In theory, everyone would like a website that only contains pretty graphics and awesome Flash animation. Although we still use these elements on our Web page, the proper balance is often overlooked, thus resulting in poorer than expected results from the site, even though on the outside it might look parfect. Additionally, with the various modem speeds used by Internet surfers around the world, Web pages must be as small as possible to decrease loading time and increase user retention.
Outline the Purpose of Your Web Site
The first thing a designer needs to establish is the purpose of the website. What market area(s) are being targeted? What age group and demographic? Is the website intended to generate leads? Sales? Answering these questions will help as a guideline to constraints which need to be considered while designing the website. This step in the process is critical to the overall success of the site and will dictate the approach one should take when designing, optimizing, and implementing the Web project at hand.
Marketing the Web Site
Once the purpose and target audience of a site has been decided, thinking about the marketing strategy to be adopted should follow. Pay-per-click, search engine submissions, and optimizing the website for various search engines are some of the available options. With the current popularity of search engines, and the fact that most Internet users go to Google or Yahoo! to find what they are looking for, doing some form of search engine optimization will help in gaining more exposure online and reap the benefits of being ranked well on the various search engines.
Keywords
The placement and selection of keywords can play an integral role in the ranking of a website. Tools like Wordtracker (www.wordtracker.com) help identify keywords that might not have been thought of, the competitiveness of those keywords, and how popular they are. Once you have performed this research, try using one keyword phrase per page (outside the necessary pages: about, contact, etc.). This way, you are keeping a common theme throughout your website while providing the user with relevant content. Identify how many keywords you would like to target and create that same number of webpages; you will in essence be creating a keyword rich website.
Review the article, 10 Steps to being found on Search Engines.
Creating your Site Map
Proper navigation is important for usability, functionality and search engine spiders. There is nothing worse than having a broken link or unfriendly navigation on a website. Before designing the various webpages, create the sitemap along with outlining the total number of webpages in the website. Grab some paper and pen and outline your entire website structure and navigation. Show which pages link to each other and once again ensure you are keeping your website theme consistent on all pages you are creating in your sitemap. You can also use this sitemap as another way for the search engine spiders to index your entire site.
Copy, Copy, Copy
Good content is critical these days, both from a search engine and user experience point of view. Today, people are often searching for relevant information using a search engine like Google or Yahoo!. It is critical to create good, keyword rich content that is relevant to the theme and <title> of a web page. Keywords should appear at least 4-6 times on every page that contains text. Users will come back to a website and have only good things to say if their experience is a positive one and they found what they were looking for.
Design
Using the information gathered from the above tips, design the site, using good HTML, CSS, and creative ideas and graphics. Based on the above research, try to maintain the necessary balance between text and html. Utilize the power of Cascading Style Sheets to its fullest and try and keep your individual web pages as close to 100kb as possible so all search engine spiders can view and index your web pages.
Quality Assurance
Testing is the key; be absolutely sure that both the navigation and link structure work perfectly, all graphics are embedded correctly, proper onpage optimization has been done (if required), and that the site works smoothly. Have either a third party Q&A specialist analyze these aspects of your website, or try getting a friend to have a look through the site for navigational purposes. It is always better to have someone review your site for quality assurance who was not involved in the design process, since they’re more likely to spot errors and discrepancies. Remember: websites that have broken links can not only annoy your client, but search engines as well.
Implementation
You are now ready to launch your website. Remember that you don’t want to upload your index page until you are ready for the search engines to spider your site. There is always the chance a search engine spider will find your site, and the worst thing you can do is turn an incomplete web page with errors live. Create a temporary directory where you can test and view your pages until they are ready to go live.
Designing a website is more than whipping together 10 pages of graphics and text. Today’s websites need to look good, as well as have a purpose. In order for a website to be effective in whatever it is understood and expected to do, it needs proper planning and research. The ultimate goal of any web designer is to create a site which captures the user’s attention and also provides relevant information that is useful to the person viewing the site. In the end, following these steps will only make life easier on you when debugging, updating, and maintaining these websites along with producing a top quality product.
Credit: This content originally published in Plug-In
