Help With Planning Your Web Site
Planning your site from the outset will save both client and designer a lot of time. When you instruct us to draw you up a sample site for approval and/or amendments you should have a rough idea of site content. This does not need to be exhaustive at this stage but should include the main pages and their titles together with any other elements that may be included. Naturally we will discuss this with you and give you guidance during our first contact but the following should give you a head start of what to expect and give you some preparation.
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Main and child pages/links
Depending on your business type, main pages for a general business site may
include the following:-
Other pages that may be classed as main pages could include Prices, Clients and Frequently Asked Questions.
If you offer various products or services you may have sub-menus leading to these individual pages. If you picture the site as a sort of family tree with parent and child pages this generally helps
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|
A
'tree' of pages with the home page at the top, main pages on the second
level and 'children' of the main pages on the third level. For sites with
a lot of information this may go several levels down.
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Other items you may wish to include are customer testimonials, a newsletter and an enquiry form. The list goes on but is really dependent on your business type.
Page
Content
With regards to text for the pages,we will assist you with this from your drafts but bear in mind that some search engines rank pages by the text content, in particular the 'home' or 'index' page so ideally this page will have important, relevant information high up on the page with sufficient but not overly repetitive use of 'keywords' relating to your business (for example, if your business sells Financial Services you would want to say this early on in your text together with references to Pensions, Mortgages, Savings Plans etc.)
Use
of Frames
A page using frames is split into separate pages and a frameset, usually to aid navigation when the site contains a lot of information. This is achieved by keeping one or more areas of the page static while other parts can be scrolled. The most common form of this is when the top and/or left areas of the page (usually housing the company logo and site navigation buttons) remain static while the body of the site scrolls down (see images below). There are downsides to using frames in that some browsers do not support them and it makes the site harder for some search engines to index, hence our site does not use them.
Images
Use of images is very important 'a picture says a thousand words' they say. That's not necessarily true but images do get a point across or convey a message a lot easier than text sometimes.
You may or may not have relevant images in the way of company logo, photographs or a map etc. (you might even have a brochure which always helps). You can either supply us with your images or we will create these images for you.
Layout
Layout is another important aspect of a web site. Generally this is our total domain, however if you have seen web sites that you have seen and liked before. Make a note of them and tell us so that we can see graphically the sort of design you are striving to achieve.
Use
of Colour
Unfortunately, though there are an infinite number of colours and variations, not all should be used when designing web sites. Due to the way browsers interpret colours we are generally limited to the 'web safe' palette consisting of 216 colours that are given 'hexadecimal values'. You will find this palette at http://www.eids.co.uk/hex.htm. The colours are shown together with their hexadecimal and RGB values. As a guidance note the hexadecimal value for black is '000000' and at the other end of the scale, white is referred to as 'FFFFFF'. The RGB reference for white would be 'R:255,G:255,B:255'
Search
Engine Optimisation
As with the layout of your new site, optimising for search engines is primarily our concern. For most web sites owners this is a very important factor, unfortunately often overlooked by the designer. Unless you have a massive advertising budget, the issue of search engine optimisation must be addressed in depth with the you. If your design company does not ask a lot of questions about your business and target audience, go elsewhere.
There are many factors to consider when optimising for search engines, amongst others, intelligent page titles and text together with correct use of META tags (though not all search engines support META tags, they are a useful and important element).
Together with the page title, there are two main META tags to concern you, they are as follows (the example here is based on the wording for a fictitious BMW dealer (Connells) targeting customers in the Bristol area). The text is written in HTML code.
<title> Connells BMW Bristol - New and Used BMW dealer offering quality car sales and servicing.</title>
<meta name="description" content="BMW sales and service from Bristol's premier dealership. All cars in stock listed, superb BMW finance options...">
<meta name="keywords" content="bmw dealers in bristol, bristol car dealers, car sales, bmw, cars, quality, motor, vehicles, sales, service, franchised, dealers, finance, german, company, 3 series, 5 series, 7 series, touring, bristol, avon, somerset, devon, uk">
The page title is generally what is displayed in search engine results together with the META description. This information therefore needs to be concise and catchy, below is how it might appear.....
Connells
BMW Bristol - New and Used BMW dealer offering quality car sales and servicing.
BMW sales and service from Bristol's premier dealership. All cars in stock listed,
superb BMW finance options...
The META keywords help some search engines to ascertain the content of the site and therefore rank it according to relevance. It is generally better if you have a specific target audience to use key "phrases" that Internet searchers are likely to type in, for example "bmw dealers in bristol". If you look through the title, content and description, then imagine what searchers will type in if they were looking for a BMW dealer in the Bristol and surrounding areas that a lot of possible, likely combinations are covered. There are rules governing the use of META tags including restriction of repetitions and use of non-relevant words. As a rule, any keyword should not be repeated more than three times. There are also limits to the number of characters, these can differ from one search engine to another but as a general rule the page "title" should not exceed 50-80 characters, your "description" 180 characters and your "keywords" 900 characters. These are not hard and fast as all engines and directories will have different rules.
Now
think of your business and target audience and put the above into practise with
words relating to your business and possibly area. Don't worry if you can't
do this as part of our service is to do this for you at no extra cost. We may
of course need help with industry or location specific words or terms.
End
of Design Guidance Articles
If you have any
further queries regarding the design considerations when planning your web site
you may e-mail us at planning@eids.co.uk
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