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Help & Resources...

help index / site planning

To assist you with planning your site we have drawn up the following considerations to bear in mind. You will also find an interactive colour chooser containing all the colours in the 'web safe' colour palette from which you should choose your main site colours in order to achieve cross-platform compatibility.

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.

If you would like to open a printable version of this page with minimal graphics, please click here.

Main and child pages/links
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Depending on your business type, main pages for a general business site may include the following:-

'Home' Page
'About Us' or 'Profile' page
'Services' or 'Products' page
'Contact Information' page

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

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.

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
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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
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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.

frames image
see live example (3 frames)

Images
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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
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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
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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, for our 'main' colours, such as backgrounds we are generally limited to the 'web safe' palette consisting of 216 colours that are given 'hexadecimal values'. Click here to open in interactive colour chooser in a new window. To choose a colour simply click the box containing the colour you like to display it and to show it's hexadecimal value at the same time.

Search Engine Optimisation
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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>

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.
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End of Design Guidance Articles
If you have any further queries regarding the design considerations when planning your web site please contact us.

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