subject: Web Design Reflects The Value Of Your Business [print this page] A lot of businesses put a great deal of time and effort into making sure that their website is properly search engine optimized. This is all well and good and is in fact an essential part of making their site easier for potential customers to find through Google and other major search engines. By no means are we suggesting that anyone neglect SEO when building their sites or trying to raise their profile on the web - but often this emphasis on SEO comes at the expense of features which are appealing to their human readers.
The most important of these is of course the actual design of the site. Your website's design encompasses many different factors, such as the way your site actually looks in terms of the color scheme and any graphics you've used. It also includes the layout of the site - something which matters a great deal. There are a lot of different ways to lay out a website, but you may have noticed that you see less and less of the unconventional looking layouts than you used to. Horizontally oriented site layouts had a certain novelty value several years ago, but they didn't have a lasting appeal, since these layouts make it more difficult to organize content in a way which is intuitive to your readers.
What you do see almost universally is a very simple, easy to read style of layout for web pages with content organized into two or three columns and a navigation bar either near the top of the page or at the left hand side (in some cases, it's on the right hand side, but this is less common). The reason this layout has become the de facto standard in web design is that it is organized in more or less the same way that most written languages are read - left to right, from the top of the page to the bottom. It's the way that our eyes are accustomed to reading. When you deviate from this design, it is at your own risk since this will almost certainly annoy readers.
There is one huge web design problem which is a lot less widespread than it used to be, though this is such an egregious error that it always bears mentioning: using Flash code in place of plain text on your website. Flash is another one of those things whose novelty value has long since come and gone; now, it largely annoys, rather than dazzles visitors (it's also terrible SEO practice). Do not, repeat, do not use Flash as a replacement for ordinary text and HTML/XML code.
What it all comes down to really is keeping your design simple. People prefer dark colored text on a light colored background, preferably black on white; and your text should be large enough and in a sans serif font to be easily readable. Color schemes should be attractive, yet simple enough that they don't detract from what your visitors are there for: content.
Search engines don't care about your design for the most part. Instead, they see your page in much the same way that someone using a text-only web browser would: but it's something which is extremely important to human readers. It often takes an exceptionally talented designer to come up with something which is simple yet visually appealing, but it's something well worth paying for unless you have the requisite light touch to craft these elegantly simple designs which readers enjoy.
