Web Design Web 2 - Aug 2008

Web design Sunshine Coast

A lot has been spoken about web 2 in relation to web design Sunshine Coast and elsewhere. Ok. Web 2 is "the use of World Wide Web technology and web design to enhance creativity, information sharing and collaboration among users." What this means for web design Sunshine Coast is that your website employs the latest proven techniques to basicall 'get your message across. If you are promoting your business, let's start with the words that people will search on and expand your copy to include these words. More on web design keywords.

Once that is completed let's move on to the appearance. Many companies work on this the other way round. I ask you, "Is it more important to be found and then look good or to look great and not be found". Part of this is using flash in your web design which we do not recommend. Read our full article - web design flash?

There are some companies who spend thousands of dollars on a shiny new website with all the bells and whistles like graphic design, blogs, shopping carts, web analytics, the lot and then fail to take advantage of it. I see it so often, regardless of company size.

Web sites that could easily be bringing in loads of traffic and revenue simply wasting away because nobody can be bothered tracking visitor activity, analysing trends or checking for search engine compatibility and usability.

These companies are simply keeping up appearances, investing heavily in Internet technology because their competitors are doing the same. But no thought has gone into the search engine compatibility of the site, how usable it is for visitors or whether it meets accessibility guidelines. They don't look at their site statistics, they don't check for broken links and they sure as heck don't investigate why their sites aren't converting traffic into customers. What a waste!

Is your web site working hard enough for you? Run it through the following 20 point fitness assessment to find out:

* Is your site fully search engine compatible? Are all your pages being indexed by the major search engines?

* Do you track your visitor statistics on a regular basis? Do you use the information provided by your visitor statistics to improve your site? More on web design marketing.

* Is your web site accessible to visually-impaired visitors?
Does it meet the international standards set down by the Web Accessibility Initiative http://www.w3.org/WAI/ (WAI)?

* Do you know which web sites and search engines provide you with the most traffic? Do you use this information to increase your traffic further? More on website links from September 2004.

* Do you track the source of all reported errors in your site statistics and fix them promptly?

* Do you know which keywords your site was found for in the search engines? Have you conducted keyword research to determine what search terms your target markets are looking for so you can optimise for them?

* Does your web site HTML code validate to W3 standards (http://validator.w3.org/)? Do you check for validation regularly?

* Does your site contain zero broken links? Do you check for and fix broken links (http://validator.w3.org/checklink) regularly?

* Has your site been fully search engine optimised to integrate your target search terms into your Page Titles, META Tags and visible page text?

* Do you measure your visitor sign-ups and conversions on a regular basis? Do you tweak your landing page copy to increase the conversion rates?

* Is your site navigation intuitive and are your visitors following the navigation paths you intended?

* Do you encourage feedback from your site visitors and provide an obvious way for them to provide such feedback?

* Are there at least 250 words of text on your home page to satisfy search engines? Have you ensured your website homepage loads quickly.

* Does your site contain a visible, text-based site map to aid user navigation?

* Do you have an ongoing link building campaign running to secure more incoming links to your site and improve your site's link popularity score?

* Does your site have a high percentage of repeat visitors? Are the majority of your visitors staying on your site for more than a minute?

* Have you created and submitted an XML sitemap to Google Sitemaps (https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login)?

* Have you created and submitted a sitemap to Yahoo Site Explorer (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/)?

* Have you checked to see if your site meets Google's Webmaster Guidelines (http://www.google.com/support/ webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769)?

* Do your search engine referrals and site traffic figures grow each month?

Unless you can answer yes to all the questions in the above checklist, your web site is not working hard enough for you and needs a workout. Is all of this valid to the web 2 discussion? At the end of the day, you need a websites that works hard for you whilst you are asleep.More on web design research.

Disclaimer

12website.com has prepared the supplied information as a voluntary service to the online community. The information is necessarily web design and small business in nature and is not intended to be relied upon other than as general background material. This should not be used as specific advice, recommendations or guidance, and specialist assistance should be sought by anyone in need of such help. 12website.com accepts no liability under any circumstances for any loss, expense, damages or costs whether direct or indirect (including loss of profits / damage to business) which may be incurred by any person as a result of relying on or using in whole or in part any of the supplied information.