Thinking outside the box is very important when designing website for either yourself or your client there are always the Basics of Website Design that we should follow, however the future of the site you are designing is very important and must be at the forefront of our mind. Thinking Out Side of The Box what has that have to do with designing a website you may ask?. I try and explain this every website or blog has a purpose online and also a future and this is where thinking outside of the box comes in.

Future Updates

Every website must be design with the future in mind this will make it easier for future upgrades as technology changes and changes to CSS and JavaScript we must update our website and never let it fade or dies because it becomes out dated. One main principle of web design is to ensure that you uses valid CSS and HTML when designing your website. With that done then styling the outer side and content becomes simpler and rather straight forward.

Using CSS

As you are all aware different browsers render cascading style sheets differently and with CSS3 and HTML5 already in use not all browsers are compliant at the time of writing this post, However don’t be afraid to use them in your design. As for CSS3 i would advise to put them in a separate style sheet and import it into you pages my reason for this is at a presentational level, thus leaving your main style sheet to validate accurately. Another key area in your future proof design is legislation in regards to accessibility.

Flash Vs JavaScript

Using flash while building your website for interaction is good some feels it is not good for SEO but as we have seen in the last few years Designers are building less and less using Flash the obvious reason here and yes you guest it right with the introduction of the JQuery library JavaScript has now reclaim its position in our design life cycle once again. To say Flash is Obsolete is risky but in the long run JavaScript for interaction seems to be winning.

So when building any website the future should always be in your mind making sure that your website is future proof . So take a look at your website and ask yourself the question is my website Future Proof?, if the answer is yes then you have nothing to be concern about. Now i put it to you to challenge yourself and get your website future proof. Please feel free to share your comment and suggestion on this topic.

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.