subject: Web Site Design And Search Engine Optimisation [print this page] I remember when I first started to build my first Web Site. I was following instructions from a book and I was amazed at how I could type a bit of HTML code into a word document and turn that into a graphical masterpiece. Okay, so it wasn't a masterpiece, but just getting a photo to show was quite impressive at the time.
Then software was released that helped you make it a lot easier to design a Web Page - they were called WYSIWYG editors. Most of us understand the What You See Is What You Get process and with products like Apple's ipad and iphone, you can see that we have taken it a step further with not only being visually understandable, but also physically intuitive.
Once web design companies created software to make it easier to design sites, we had people putting up pages left and right. And, if you were around back then, you might remember how bad many of these pages were. Many used very busy and messy background images that made the web page painful to look at. This was true with the first phase of do-it-yourself Myspace pages too. Luckily we have people that write books like "Web pages that suck" so we can improve on our design. Or better yet, we can hire an expert that understands that using too many different fonts will only irritate your readers.
Punishment helps - I remember one of the groups that wrote a book on Web Design offered a contest where the first place winner would get 1 week in Bakersfield as a prize. The second place winner would get two weeks in Bakersfield. I read that about 10 years ago and still remember the joke. Sometimes we need a little pressure to get us going and if we can laugh about our design and move forward - we have a chance for survival. My web pages have drastically changed over the years in order to adapt to what's new and just as we went from typing in HTML to using WYSIWYG editors, we also must adjust to new and improved web site software or programs that help us do a better job.
Once I got a hang of web design my first real web site was really big image map. It contained a lot of images (like the cover of a magazine) that you could click on to take you where you wanted to go. It was fun but I soon learned it wasn't good for search engines - back to the drawing board. I even had one of my other sites purely designed in flash that I had to downgrade to HTML for the same reasons. Something that looks great (and is visually pleasing) isn't always better.
When we first started making web pages we didn't have as much focus on keywords, meta tags and strategies like SEO were unheard of. Now we need a web page that is not only good to look at, but also meets all of the requirements of a search engine so that you can actually have people enjoying your web pages and not get lost in the crowd.
