Your website is the center of your online business; it is the virtual representation of your company, whether your company physically exists or not.
When you do business online, people cannot physically see you as they would if they were dealing with an offline business.
Therefore, people judge you on your appearance. This is where good design comes in.
Imagine if you are running a business offline. Would you allow your salespeople to dress in casual or threadbare clothing when dealing with your customers?
By having your staff dress professionally, you are telling your clients that you care about quality. This works simply because first impressions matter.
Similarly, the same case occurs with your website. If your website is poorly put together and seems like a 5 minute “quick fix”, you are literally yelling at your visitors that you are not a professional and you don’t care about quality.
On the contrary, if you have a totally professional looking website design, you are giving your visitors the perception that you have paid meticulous attention to every detail and that you care about professionalism.
You are organized, focused and you really mean business.
On the other hand, you should also have everything related to your company well designed. From business cards to letterheads to promotional brochures, everything matters.
This is because as you grow your business, these elements become the face of your business. Again, think of the “poorly dressed salesman” analogy and you’ll get my point.
Search Engine Friendly Pages
There is no point in creating a website unless visitors enter A major source of traffic for most sites on the Internet are search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Altavista, etc.
Therefore, by designing a search engine friendly site, you will be able to easily rank in search engines and get more visitors.
The major search engines use programs called crawlers or robots to index websites and list them on their search results pages.
They follow links to a page, read the content of the page, and record it in their own database, opening the list as people search for it.
If you want your site to be indexed easily, you should avoid using frames on your website. Frames will only confuse search engine bots and they might even leave your site because of it.
Additionally, frames make it difficult for users to bookmark a specific page on your site without using long and complicated scripts.
Do not present important information on Flash movies or pictures. Search engine bots can only read text in your source code, so if you present important words in Flash movies and images rather than in textual form, your search engine ranking will be dramatically affected.
Use meta tags accordingly on each and every page of your site so that search engine bots know at a glance what that particular page is about and whether or not they should index it.
By using meta tags, you are making it easier for the search engine bot to crawl and index your site more often.
Stop using bad HTML tags like <font> to design your page. Use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) instead because they are more effective and efficient. By using CSS, you can remove redundant HTML tags and make your pages much lighter and faster to load.
Pros and Cons of Flash-based Sites
Flash-based sites have been insane for the past few years, and as Macromedia compiles more and more great features into Flash, we can only predict that there will be more and more Flash sites on the Internet.
However, it has been disputed that Flash-based sites are bloated and unnecessary. Where exactly do we draw the line? Here is a simple breakdown.
The good:
Interactivity
Flash Action script opens up a vast field of possibilities. Developers and designers have used Flash to create interactive features ranging from highly animated comment forms to engaging Flash-based games.
This new level of interactivity will always keep visitors coming back for more.
A standardized site
With Flash, you don’t have to worry about cross-browser compatibility. No more hassle about how a certain CSS code is displayed differently in Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Opera.
When you put your site elements in Flash, they will always appear as is as long as the user has Flash Player installed.
Better expression through animation.
In Flash, one can make use of its animation features to convey a message in a much more efficient and effective way.
Flash is a lightweight option for animation because it is vector-based (and therefore smaller file sizes) as opposed to actual “movie files” which are frame-based and therefore sized much older.
The bad and the ugly:
The Flash Player
People have to download the Flash player in advance before they can watch Flash movies, so by using Flash the visitor rank will drop considerably because not everyone will be willing to download the Flash player just to view your site.
You will also have to try harder to redirect the user to the Flash download page if they don’t have the player installed.
Site optimization
If your content were presented in Flash, most search engines would not be able to index your content. Therefore, you will not be able to rank well in search engines and there will be less traffic going to your site.
Loading time
Users have to wait longer than usual to load Flash content compared to normal text and images, and some visitors may lose their patience and click the back button. The longer it takes to load your Flash, the greater the risk of losing visitors.
The best way to do this is to use Flash only when the interactivity and movement that comes with it is absolutely necessary.
Otherwise, use a mixture of Flash and HTML or use pure text if your site is simply for presenting simple graphical and textual information.
Why Hire A Designer?
Many online business owners start out with no money. They have to do everything themselves: preparing a product, developing a marketing strategy, actually building a website to meet the marketing needs of their product.
As their business expands over time, they will find that your simple “home” site might not be enough to cover everything, and they will have to take a day or two to simply spend on website expansion.
Sounds familiar? Chances are, you’re someone who started it all with no money too, so you’re pretty skeptical when it comes to giving away your money in exchange for something you could have made yourself.
However, hiring a designer involves much more than just finishing a job you don’t want to do.
When you hire a web designer to do your work for you, you are doing more than just handing over the “dirty work” to someone else.
In fact, by paying a little money, you can let the designer worry about the little annoyances that always evade the main image and only appear when you are in the middle of work. That way, you’ll be more focused and have more time to spend on your actual business strategy.
On the other hand, designers hire professionals to be good at what they do. By outsourcing your web design jobs to them, you won’t have to worry when problems arise because you can always have them fix it for you.
Again, they will be able to identify the problem and fix it faster than you probably can.
Plus, the work you pay for will turn out to be more professional than you can achieve because designers have been doing it longer than you. After all, they do it for a living, so they have to be good!
So, remember not only to work on your business, but also to grow your business!
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