Web Design News

Too few web designers seem to understand the importance of thinking about search engine optimisation right from the design stage. That’s really rather sad because that’s the point where everything should be on the table and ready to be woven into the finished product.

But even when search engine optimisation is being thought of a number of basic mistakes are being made. For example, do you stop and consider who is the target audience for the website and what words they might use to search for the product that the website you’re designing is trying to sell?

It’s all well and good to go and consult Word Tracker or even the old Overture tool (if you can get it to work for you) but are the words and terms you input into those tools really the words that the target audience would use to search for the site your designing?

It’s an interesting problem and one that’s easy to overcome if you stop and think about it for a few moments. Don’t think that you have the answers just because you happen to live in the same area as the website might be targeting - you really have to look to an expert to provide you with the words you need.

I was just checking our ranking for a search term that’s of some importance to our business at a local level and came across one of our competitors who seems to equate search engine optimisation with submitting new websites to all the search engines.

Good luck to anyone who uses that business. They’re obviously so new to the game that they don’t remember the days when some search engines marked down websites that were submitted to them and marked up those sites that their spider found without any prompting.

Here at Copy Text we like to take great pride in the simple navigation we build into clients’ sites. The navigation is where users expect to see it, the links are obvious and the words that appear in the link leave little room for any misunderstanding about where they will lead to. It’s a simple matter of click and you’ll be there.

But yesterday I had a most frightening experiene. Toni and I were in the office of a client and he was trying to navigate his way to a new page we had added to his website. Instead of using the simple navigation we had built into the site he fiddled about and clicked in his browser’s address bar, wandered up to the tool bar and did something there and generally mucked around trying to get to that new page.

As we left I asked Toni if she had understood what on earth he was doing.

“No” she said shaking her head. “I have no idea what he was doing but somehow he ended up with what looked like his site embedded in what might have been a frame that seemed to include his Gmail inbox.”

And that’s exactly what it looked like.

I have no idea how he did it and I’m not sure I want to know either but I certainly hope no one else navigates their way around the Web the way he does because if they do then we web designers are all doomed!

Earlier this week I happened to stop and read this post on Seomoz where the writer suggested that it was time for some of those ‘ugly’ Web 1.0 sites to catch up to the rest of the Net and include some real Web 2.0 content on their sites.

If you read that post you’ll see a lot of people who agreed with the author and then you come to one person who didn’t … and that was me. You see, I’m of the firm opinion that there are horses for courses.

 All those nice touchy-feely little things you can do with Web 2.0 are fine but not every site has users who are comfortable with things Web 2.0 and to include them on some sites would be the kiss of death to those sites. Ironically sports fishing sites - the example used by the writer over on Seomoz - is probably one of the worst examples she could have chosen.

But then who am I to say? 

I may not be trendy but I am more in touch with reality than some people and youth and enthusiasm is never a match for experience and cunning - as long as you’re not too old and not too smart for your own good

It seems that although most people don’t notice it the standard RGB colours available for use on the Web today aren’t quite as rich as the human eye can actually handle. But fear not, more colours are on the way and you can read about them here

… the very very different

I’m not sure that you should try this at your place

Abandoned shopping carts litter every e-commerce site out there on the Web as site visitors begin the shopping cycle and then, for whatever reason, change their minds.

While some smart e-tailers report an abandonment rate as low as 10% others see an abandonment rate of up to 80% and a lot of the problem is caused by us web designers. Many of us fail to understand that the online shopping experience has to be made as easy for site visitors as possible.

The more steps a prospective purchaser has to go through between choosing what they want to buy and actually hitting the checkout page the greater the risk that they will abandon their carts. That’s something that we should always remember and make sure that our clients understand.

But it seems that some web designers like to make the checkout experience as involved and difficult as they possibly can.

For some interesting thoughts on shopping cart design check out Help for Better Shopping Cart Design over at Cre8pc.

Next door to our computer shop is a sales office for a large land development here in Hervey Bay. For quite some time now the sales team have been complaining that the marketing team is out of touch with reality … and they certainly do have some grounds for making a statement like that. Their marketing is definitely under-performing because it’s targeting the wrong demographic.

Fails on keywords
Their website is also underpeforming but for a totally different reason … it was never really built to perform. It fails on all the important keywords and keyword phrases that it needs to rank for  and it fails because they’re simply not included in the text on the pages.

Instead it attempts to rely on keywords that the desighner has stuffed into the keyword Meta tag. Now I should point out that Hervey Bay is one of the sea-change capitals of Australia so there are lifestyle issues here and it’s also promoted as the whale watching capital of Australia so perhaps that’s why the designers thought it important to fill the keyword Meta tag with these key words:

hervey bay, harvey bay, harveybay, herveybay, investments,
land sales,house and land, fraser island, wide bay, fraser coast,
whale watching, augustus, augustus land, lots for sale,
blocks for sale, sections for sale, pialba, builders,
homes, new homes, for sale, display homes, lifestyle, parks,
walkways, forest, schools, cbd, local shopping, hospitals,
golf club, golf course

Fails on marketing
It fails from a marketing point of view because it stresses the features of the land development rather than the benefits that flow to someone who might buy a a block in the development.

Fails on price
But then I guess I shouldn’t be surprised - for a multi-million dollar land development they only paid $750.00 for the website.

 At the moment one of the sales team’s own websites ranks better for one of the keyword phrases than does the development company’s own website. How sad is that!

Unbelievably bad so it seems.

For a small web design business like Copy Text Online business can be generated at some unusual times and events. This last weekend Toni and I hosted a surprise party for Toni’s parents to celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary and now we’re working on two websites for people who attended the party.

One is for Toni’s sister who runs a bricks-and-mortar business and has had a website associated with the business online for four or five years. The site has never performed anywhere near their expectations, it’s never ranked in the first 10 pages for any important search term, nothing but the index page is currently appearing in Google and traffic numbers are tiny.

She and her husband asked us to take a look at it and it was immediately obvious why their site was doing so poorly. Our report to them covered five pages but the important points were:

• All navigation was via Flash buttons - there was no sitemap.
• The index page consisted of one small Flash banner with an embedded ‘enter’link’ and no text so no search engine spider could find its way inside.
• There were broken links and some navigation buttons only appeared at the bottom of several internal pages.
• The site used frames.
• There was a complete lack of sales text, there were no calls to action and the site failed to give surfers the street address of the business (The products offered by the business could not be sold online and customers needed to visit the business to complete their purchase).
• Keywords and keyword phrases were also missing.

Now you wouldn’t design a site that lacked all those essentials now would you?

Now there is a radical idea! Whoever thought that we should be designing websites for users?

Obviously my tongue is planted firmly in my cheek when I say that but it’s obvious that so many web designers don’t design sites for users. Oh of course they pay lip service to the principle that we should be designing sites for users but in reality many simply don’t think for a moment about how the user might interact with the site they are designing.

And then when you add search engine optimisation into the equation some designers will throw their hands in the air and declare that you simply cannot have the best of both worlds. Well guess what? If you know what you’re doing it can! If you don’t know what you’re doing it will show.

And Kim Krause Berg has been working in that area for years. You should find The Discipline Behind User Experience Design worth reading