Web Design Information courtesy of EnhanceYourPC.co.uk


Do You Make These Common (But Deadly) Website Design Mistakes?


Building a website can be overwhelming, here are some design tips to help keep you on the right path (or is that web?)

--- Designing a Frames-based web site

Frames may make the job of maintaining a big web site easy, but search engines hate them. Most search engines cannot find their way through them and end up indexing only the home page. Lose your frames right away. You will start getting positive improvements the moment you redesign your site without frames.

--- Having an all-Flash or graphic-only home page

This is another classic mistake. Many designers design web site home pages like brochures. A beautiful cover which has to be opened to read. But on the Internet every click takes away some prospects. Did they click your ENTER button or the Back button? Search engines need content to index. If you don't have words on the home page and only a Flash movie or an animated graphic, how will the search engines know what you do?

--- Not having a good title

A good title is critical for getting good search engine positions and the most vital thing -- the click-through. With the title, you are always walking a tightrope. You need a title with your most important keyword near the beginning but it should still appeal to the human reading the results.

--- Hosting your site with a FREE host

Don't do it. It takes away all your credibility. Most of the search engines don't even index web sites on free hosts. Even if they do, they rank them quite low.

--- Stuffing lots of keywords in the keywords tag

Do you have a keywords tag that lists all the words related to your product in a big long series? This is a certain recipe to invite negative points. Put only the 2-3 most important keywords in there. Here's a quick test - don't put any term in the keyword tag if it doesn't appear at least once in the body copy.

--- Not having any outgoing links

Do you know why the Internet is called the Web? Because the web sites link to each other. If you only have incoming links and no outbound links, it's not appreciated by the search engines as it violates the basic structure of the Web. Because some people try to conserve PageRank (a proprietary index used by Google to measure link popularity), they avoid having any outbound links. This is one big myth. You can get very good points if you have some outbound links with keyword-rich anchor text and preferably keyword-rich target URL also.

--- Insisting on session variables and cookies to show information

Session variables are used extensively by ecommerce-enabled sites. This is to trace the path used by the visitor. Shopping cart and various other applications also benefit by using session variables. However it should be possible to visit the various information related and sales pages without needing to have session variables. Since search engine spiders don't index cookies, they can't index your pages properly if the navigation requires cookies and session variables.

--- Regularly submitting your site to the search engines

"We will submit your site to the top 250,000 search engines every month for only $29.95." Who has not seen these ads or received Spam with similar messages? And which are those 250,000 search engines? There are only a handful of top search engines worth bothering about. For some sites if you resubmit while you are waiting to be indexed, you entry is pushed to the end of the queue. So you can resubmit regularly and never get indexed!

--- Optimizing for more than 2 or 3 search terms

It is virtually impossible to optimize a page for more than 2-3 keywords without diluting everything. Don't try to work on more than 3 phrases on one page. Split. Get similar phrases together and work on those in this page. Take 2 or 3 out of the other phrases and develop a new page with entirely new copy. Remember, you cannot just copy the same page and squeeze these new phrases in there. It will look very funny to the visitor.

Author: http://www.JamesBurchill.com - James is a freelance writer and consultant


MORE RESOURCES:

Web Design Agency in Nottingham Develops New eCommerce Pacakage
PR Web (press release), WA - 4 hours ago
Nottingham, UK (PRWEB) November 20, 2008 -- WebCatch are a young, up and coming Web Design Company based in Nottingham UK. They are making an astounding ...


Law Firm Web Design Company Now Offers A Free 5 Day Course in ...
IPR Wire, CA - 12 hours ago
The law firm web design company, Lawyer Web Templates, has been offering high quality web building services and templates for years. ...


Web design firm's span reaches from Dnieper to Danbury
Danbury News Times, CT - Nov 18, 2008
... a city in western Ukraine near the country's border with Poland, got the idea to start the firm while working at another Web design outfit in Stamford. ...


Klue

Also wanted: Web Design Ninja!
Klue, Malaysia - Nov 19, 2008


Denver Interactive Agency Ranks Among The World’s Best in Web ...
PR Web (press release), WA - Nov 17, 2008
... and visual communications, as a winner in the Interactive Annual 14, the magazine’s annual competition for excellence and innovation in web design. ...
Amalgamated Pixels Awarded 2008 Davey Award MarketWatch
all 10 news articles


HTML Fundamentals
mediabistro.com, NY - 1 hour ago
David has taught Flash, HTML, and other web design-related topics at Parsons School of Design since early 2000. David is a masterful teacher. ...


Web Design Index by Content 3
Architecture.sk, Slovakia - Nov 17, 2008
Would you like an overview of the state of the art in web design in a specific field? Web Design Index by Content provides exactly that: every year, ...


OnWheelsInc.com Unveils New Web Design
MarketWatch - Nov 6, 2008
DETROIT, Nov 06, 2008 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- OnWheelsInc.com, an automotive site for minority car buyers, enthusiasts and general web surfers alike, ...


Web design & FOSS
ZDNet UK, UK - Nov 14, 2008
This puts me within striking distance of London for contract web design work but I still want to work remotely and move back into teaching.


EDSF Report on Web Design Color Preferences
What They Think, KY - Nov 11, 2008
The report, titled "Color Preferences in Web Design," is available now as a free download at www.edsf.org. The report is a result of the EDSF research grant ...

Web-Design - Google News

home | site map
© 2007