subject: Web Design - Substance Vs. Style [print this page] When creating a new website for your new company, you can easily find yourself in a battle between substance and style. You need a strong visual element to your site that will catch your potential client's attention. An exciting 'cool' factor to your website will help generate buzz as people share your link to show to their friends and colleagues. On the other hand, will written content is necessary for the life of your website. It is no secret that search engines crawl the content on your webpage and based upon the strength of it rank your website accordingly. Plus the text will explain to your potential clients exactly what it is your business offers far more quickly than strong graphics.
You need a good balance of both elements, but in what measures? Consider the information that is immediately viewable on your computer monitor (without having to scroll down the page). In that live area needs to be strong elements of both substance and style.
Strictly for SEO purposes, Flash animation gets a bad wrap. This is because it is impossible for the spiders sent out by Google to crawl your site to read it. However, it is a very effective way to draw your clients eye affordably. A flash banner at the top of your page with some simple animation to get the viewer involved with your page is worth considering. Avoid animation that will take more than a couple of seconds to load. If viewers have to wait too long for the flash to load they may well assume your site is 'broken' and move on to another site.
Designers will often make the mistake of putting the relevant text down below the page fold simply to give the search engines information to crawl. However, strong text is very important to sell your client on your services so it is important to have good solid copy ready to be easily digested. A great way to get your point across quickly is bullet points, with the individual bullets being links to even more relevant copy on the subject. At that point, once you have piqued the readers interest enough to follow a link you can go into greater detail on your service using all the strong relevant content that you have created to sell your product or service.
