My last post was titles “looking for Inspiration” many people think that i was moving away from my usual topic of Web Designing and other related fields in this post we will look at my favourite subject Website Design and if you look carefully i have just changed my website templates. One main piece of advice i would always give is whenever you are planning to design a website the first thing to bear in mind is the audience this is really important because they are the ones that are going to use the site although search engines are important but the usability is one of the key factor to any website success.

Design for User ability and Visibility

Your website should always be designed with your targeted audience in mind by this i meant if you are building a site about real estate then your target audience should be those looking information about real estate. Never be afraid to look at other successful website for inspiration take a leaf out of their book but don’t copy their design make sure your website stand out from the crowd blending in is not always the best thing i always advice to stand out from the crowd.

When you first launch your website or your client website you just speculate what the audience will be like or wants but after a few months live their will lots of tools to tell you what exactly the readers/visitors or doing on your website there and then you will be able to make the necessary adjustments needed to suit your client and to better planned your marketing strategies.  It is brilliant to have a well design site nice graphics some flash to enhance the appearance of the outcome but is it wise to choose style over substance ask yourself the question is worth it having a beautiful website but not indexed by the search engines, then now is the time to dig deeper and you realize that the inside was a complete mess your web design company id not pay any attention to the optimization of your website the ineffectiveness of your web designer just begins to hit you.

Do your Research

Having an effective website is one that is coded and written with search engine visibility and user friendliness in mind these sites usually gets better results from search engine traffic  the conclusion here is that you should design with your targeted audience in mind not just our personal preferences.

Content is all about Search Engine this is what we as bloggers work very hard to achieve, getting good ranking means having  fully optimized pages but we often forget that we should write for readers and not Search Engines, yes when writing your content your readers should be priority and when designing your website your design should take Search Engine in mind. Before you digest this i must emphasize i am no expert neither with search Engines nor Website Designing i just share my opinion which are solely mines and also my experience with my readers. now lets get back to the main purpose of this post.

Creating unique content is very important for our blogs, using keywords, Bold texts and keyword rich titles are all important factors for search engine rankings and these also helps your readers identifies the importance of the topics.

Ask most Bloggers and writers they try as much as possible to include Keywords in their post, we al realize from some time ago that the inclusion of keywords in your posts is very important, However the key factors here is to ensure that your content is unique and readable for your readers however they are humans not robots and most readers will agree with you that having unique content is what makes your blog great.

Content is King how many times have you read that ?,well i am letting you in a little secret never forget that  king needs a Castle, this is where your Design skills play its part. With that said it is fair to say that your website design is the second most important area of concern for your blog.

Designing for Search Engines is where your SEO skills or your knowledge can and should play its part. Writing brilliant content is great but not having your pages indexed is a disaster it is like having a blog without content or writing rubbish. Having a sitemap and good structured navigation are prerequisites of a good website design. Another factor is that text based navigation should be preferred to flash or JavaScript structured navigation if your website is design using flash you should always place navigational text base links at the bottom of your website to compensate the flash ones. This will make it easier for the bots to follow and index your pages.

Keywords Placing these in the first paragraph is advisable this gives the belief that search engines place emphasis on this and also when the content is place closer to the top of your pages. The two main layouts seen today is the navigations on the left content on the right or the opposite where the content is on the left on the navigations on the right whatever layout you choose is a choice of yours the main focus should be that your pages are design that they are easily crawled and indexed.

The main purpose of optimizing your website is to ensure that your contents get index by all the major search engines and also the lesser ones. Writing unique and readable content should be at the top of your agenda and secondly designing your pages in such away that  they are easily indexed should be every website owners main goals. I have said my views now leave your comments have your say and remember to retweet of share on twitter.

We have gone through a tough year of trying to adjust ourselves to the ever changing world of web design the web 2.0 era social networking sites the new guidelines for bloggers in regards to disclosure policy well all that aside i must remind you that i am no expert in seo or web designer just trying to share some knowledge with you.We are quite aware of the fact that as bloggers we crave for a decent Google Page Rank i too would love a pr 6 blog unfortunately that is not the case at the moment what the future holds for lawmacs.com in the next updates  not sure but i pay little attention to pr at the moment now lets turn or attention to the latest news that Google has hinted that Page Speed will be included in its ranking factor .

There are some topics about this but as Website Designer when creating Web pages this should already be a factor taken into consideration as i have mentioned in one of my earlier post Content or Page Rank that when creating or designing your web pages you should focus on the user and everything else will follow not surprisingly Page Speed has now been include as part the ranking factor  to help with your Page Loading Time here are some Tips

(1)Put Cascading Style Sheet at the top this lets your page load faster and the server only needs to read this file once and it is best practice to use CSS sprite buy this is meant using one image with smaller images embedded in it and use your style sheet to do the rest.

(2)JavaScript - Avoid using too much heavy files put JavaScript files at the bottom i too use JavaScript files but try to use small files for quicker Loading Time we all like a little fancy or stylish website but too many animations is not advisable but you can still make your design stylish without too many scrolling text or animation.

(3)Page size Try to keep your page at a reasonable size some recommend that it be about 50k although some times we go above this ensure that the user doesn’t have to scroll horizontally to view your web pages this can be a turn off. test your website pages with several browsers and make sure that they load completely and quickly make sure that your links work.

After all we design to suit of readers although search engines are the source of our traffic the reader is the one that bring the clicks and help your website to generate the revenue so now i left you to share your thoughts on this post do you think page speed should be a part of your ranking factor? have your say.

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