This article reveals several important web design elements you must consider during website optimization process.

1. CSS Stylesheet

It is good to use CSS stylesheet to format your web design because it can standardize the appearance of your website. For the sake of convenience, some web designers use internal CSS.

It is no good! You should use external CSS stylesheet so that
your HTML coding becomes consise, and mainly compose of your website content. It is an essential SEO practice.

2. Content Management Software (CMS)

If you use CMS to manage your website, make sure your CMS provides these features:

a. Allows you to define different templates for different sections/pages. It gives you flexibility in optimizing website content.

b. Allows you to define Title and Meta tags for different web pages. Again, it gives you flexibility in optimizing every web page.

c. Allows you to generate static HTML pages instead of dynamic pages. Search engines are not good at reading dynamic web page. Accoding to Google webmaster guideline, Google may not index dynamic URL with more than 2 parameters within the URL.

If your web pages cannot get indexed, you definitely get no rankings no matter how many SEO effort you make.

3. HTML Code Compliance

As a good web design practice, make sure your HTML coding is compliant to some well recognized HTML standards such as W3C standard. Some search engine optimizers reported that non-compliant web design could cause difficulties for search engines
to index and analyze your website. It hinders your website to get top search engine ranking.

4. Use of Graphics

You must optimize the file size of your images. As search engines like to read text, you should consider avoiding the use of graphics near top of your website, whenever it is possible.

5. Multiple-level Navigation Menu

Many websites use multiple-level navigation menu in Javascript. However, the coding usually leaves in the HTML body. This is no good in terms of SEO. I recommend seperate Javascrpt from HTML coding by using external Javascript file. For example, Marketshare - an Asia consumer market research firm, found that their website cannot get indexed properly by several search engines. This situation has been changed only after adopting external Javascript.

6. Bad Web Design

To make your web design search engine friendly, you must consider avoiding:

a. Use of frame. Search engines have difficulties to index all your frameset. Even though they can index some frame pages, users would only access to part of your webpages only in case they can find your website from search engines, e.g., only see a left-hand side navigation menu with a blank page on the right-hand side.

b. Re-direct techniques. For some reasons, web designers may make some re-direct pages or adopt Javascript re-direct techniques and re-direct visitors from one page to another content pages. Since search engine spammers usually use this technique, search engines could penalize your website.

7. Flash

Web designers may sell you to build a flash website or make a flash intro page as your home page. Their point is that flash makes your website more appealing and it would improve effectiveness of your website. However, it is not always the case.

Visitors want to find information fast. Flash sometimes could make your website slow and require visitors to install plugins before they can see your website. In terms of SEO, simply speaking, search engines treat flash as a graphic and cannot analyze content inside a flash file. The implication means a flash website is hard to get top search engine ranking.

Conclusion:

For small business to succeed online, you must strike a balance between SEO and fancy web design. A too fancy web design, in many cases, cannot give you any business as no one can find your website from search engines and if it annoys your visitors.

Jimsun Lui, is working in Agog Digital Marketing Strategy Limited, a company offers SEO Services for both English and Chinese search engines. Click here to learn more about how to optimize website. The company also offers Ecommerce Web Design Service with an emphasis of search engine friendliness.

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Technology, at its best, is transparent - it’s the invisible lubricant between what I want to do, and having done it. A ball-point pen, for example, is successful because it requires very little from me to make it work. I can put ink to paper without needing to think about all the messy and mechanical things a writer had to deal with in the past.

The same idea holds true for Web 2.0 technologies. We’re seeing a decentralization of media creation and distribution as blogs grow to challenge traditional publications. Wikis and open source are driving the co-operative creation of everything from content to code. This in turn is leading to an environment in which applications are becoming as rich on the Web as on the PC, with the advantage of being faster to market, adaptive and componentized, so they can be snapped together to create any number of new user experiences. Why not pair a satellite mapping service with an ad-supported local business directory? What about being able to update your code base in a matter of minutes, rather than hours? In a way, the original promise of the Web - what you want, how you want it, easily - is coming true.

Unfortunately these great strides aren’t always being matched by great design. The leveling aspect of free Web applications is also creating a lowest common denominator in terms of user interface. If 2.0 marks the Web’s adolescence (with emphasis on personal independence, what friends think, and defiance to the establishment), then Web design could be in for a rough ride. And it’s the responsibility of the design community to provide some proper adult supervision through this phase.

So what does that mean, practically? It means embracing new technologies like AJAX for a dynamic page; tagging searches with multi-directional ‘folksonomies’ rather than ranked taxonomies, for more flexible, intuitive results; and providing multiple points of entry versus hierarchical navigation schemes for friction-free flow. How this translates into design on the pixel level will vary, but as professionals, I think we have a mandate and a responsibility to our clients to be best-in-class in any design arena, and it’s incumbent on us to be fluent in all aspects of the web as it continues to evolve.

I don’t presume to tell you how to design sites here, but I do want to suggest this guiding principle: understand how these new technologies are shifting the way people use the Web, and shift your approach to interface design accordingly. Provide the appropriate technology in the most user-directed, functional way, and get out of the way. Because at the end of the day, the utility of a design isn’t measured in how many technology stripes you can point to on your sleeve. It’s measured by how often people use your site, and how good the experience is. The goal, for any of us, should be to provide an experience that asks as little as possible from an end-user. It must be seamless, much as the smooth motion of that ball-point pen.

Jamie Monberg is the new director of interactive for Hornall Anderson Design Works, a brand-focused, graphic and interactive design firm in Seattle. Get in touch at j_monberg@hadw.com or by visiting http://www.hadw.com.

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Marketing and communications professionals are constantly looking for creative ways to promote their businesses and organizations. It’s a way of life. Where a normal person sees a refrigerator magnet, a marketing specialist sees a chance at continuous visibility. Where a normal person sees a free postcard, a marketing specialist sees potential publicity for his company’s new service. Where a normal person sees a collection of pictures and words online and calls it a website, a marketing specialist often does the same thing, and that’s a problem.

The web is our most powerful, yet most neglected tool in marketing. Very few organizations truly take advantage of its power. Many of my clients become my clients because they need to update their branding. They need a new logo, office materials and marketing materials. They most often have a website, but it typically isn’t what they want to update first. When I ask employees what they want to get out of new branding, the answer is either “nicer business cards and things to send/give out” or “don’t bother me.” This is a tremendous insight into that fact that selfishness is a huge motivator. Employees rarely visit their company website unless it’s their job to do so.

They personally give out their business cards and other collateral and they want those materials to reflect well on them. Or, in the “don’t bother me” group, they just want to do their jobs and don’t want to be hassled by some annoying designer. At any rate, the website becomes secondary and employee’s needs are first.

The lesson here is this: if you want to get into the mind of your market, you have to discover what selfish need they have that will get them to visit your website and give you business. The web is powerful because it provides instant answers for people actively searching for information. The web is not just about pajama-clad 20-somethings looking to buy CDs before bedtime. Every demographic imaginable has representatives online actively seeking you out. For example, a company employs a PR specialist to help build business. That PR specialist knows that she needs to align the company with a charity to offset some of the company’s prior bad behavior and create a story for a press release.

If she stumbles on your organization’s website and reads about your history, annual events and contact information, she may move on. But if your website discusses how your services dramatically helped specific people, how you are growing each year, how if she gives over $5,000 her company will be listed in every publication you produce, and how your corporate donor program has positively affected another company like hers, she may pick up the phone to talk to you. Throw in a choice of a free Spa package at the local tr

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