Website design desiderata:
- Traffic
- Accessibility
- Communication
- Structure
- Identity
We've been know to do some website development from time to time and in the process we've learned that the three most important things for a website are traffic, traffic, traffic. Well, we need to qualify that with the following - by traffic we mean that your website reaches everyone that it needs to. If you are selling something, that means everyone who conceivably might want to buy it. If you generalize "selling something" to include such things as consulting services or a political position then we have fully stated the first job of a website - attract traffic.
Although there are a great many ways to drive traffic to your website (you can buy it for one) usually the single best way is from search engines. Forgetting Google for the moment, SEs favor sites with much useful information. That (usually) means large quantities of text. And not text about how your product or service or position is the greatest; but text of general import. If your site promotes a construction toy it will help if you have a great deal of information about construction toys in general as well as a great deal of information about your own construction toy.
Another kind of text that you need are meta-tags. Ideally each of your pages has the appropriate meta-tags in its header. They are there as an aid to SEs as they spider your site. Back in the day, you could do very well with the SEs just by knowing how to write your meta-tags. While that is no longer the case (SEs have become much more sophisticated) well written meta-tags are more important than ever: you are competing with more and more pages every day.
Of course, you cannot expect the SEs to just find you. Well, if your site is hosted on the right server (ours) they'll find you but they might not know what to do with you unless you submit your site to:
- major SEs,
- minor SEs, and
- directories
Getting listed in the directories helps with SEs because they give more weight to sites once they are listed. Unfortunately, what was once "the directory," DMOZ, is effectively out of business. The only way to get your site listed at this point is to become a DMOZ editor - they're working on a two year backlog. In any event, the directories will send traffic to you even if the major SEs don't.
Google: the SE riddle, wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma and always a conundrum, is still the 800 pound SE gorilla (with only ~60% of the search engine "market" down from 85%). Among other things Google will rank your site by looking at what sites link to yours. One more reason to submit your site to as many directories as possible. After that things become extremely murky. Google is always fine tuning its site ranking algorithms. Recently they introduced a 'sitemap program' and while they claimed that submitting a sitemap to them in their preferred XML format would not increase your ranking - it appears that it might. And so on. Google watching has replaced Kremlin watching as the preferred sport of the cryptonista.
Accessibility:
The second consideration is not to drive surfers away when they get there. Sites should load fast, work well in the major browsers and be easy to navigate, i.e., the surfer can find anything you have that he might be interested in easily and quickly.
Communication:
The third job is to communicate exactly what you need to communicate. The burden here is on the client. For the first two: traffic and accessibility are the website designers responsibility. The communication task can only be accomplished with the aid of you, the client.
Structure:
Web pages fall into one of two basic types: static and dynamic. Static pages sit on the server in exactly the form that you see them. Dynamic pages are generated on-the-fly from a database. Content managed sites, of necessity, fall into the second category. With a content managed site you, the site owner, can change most of the content on most of the pages at any time. Also use dynamic page generation when you want to generate your pages from an inventory database.
Identity:
This encompasses the look and feel of the site including graphics, logos and animation. For graphic designers this is the most important part of the design. Notice, however, that we put it last. We do that because you can have a very simple site that is very successful. Look at the two most successful sites on the Internet: Google and Yahoo; virtually no design in the sense that a graphic designer would use the term.
At MediaCraft we thoroughly understand what is needed.
