Good website design must also contain:
- Descriptive page titles
- Simple, obvious, website navigation menus
- Topic-specific, free information
- A good site map (What is a site map?)
- Appropriate use of graphics (website animation )
- Valid (x)html markup! (What is HTML?)
- Good page titles
- Good links to important information
- Website accessibility features
- Web-safe color combinations (What are web-safe color combinations?)
- User-friendly website navigation
- Important meta tags
- Only good SEO practices (What is SEO?)
Every good website can expect to receive some search engine referral visitors. The best website information is what every search engine tries to provide their users, within their search results pages (SERPs).
What Is a Site Map?
A site map (or sitemap) is a list of pages of a website accessible to crawlers or users.
What Is a Crawler?
The term "crawler" is just another word for "spider" and "robot." These are basically software programs that crawl the web and index site information for search engine databases.
Sitemaps are particularly helpful if:
- Your site has dynamic content.
- Your site has pages that aren't easily discovered by Googlebot during the crawl process (for example, pages featuring rich AJAX or Flash).
- Your site is new and has few links to it. (Googlebot crawls the web by following links from one page to another, so if your site isn't well linked, it may be hard for search engines to discover it.)
- Your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.
You can also use a sitemap to provide Google with additional information about your pages, including:
- How often the pages on your site change. For example, you might update your product page daily, but update your About Me page only once every few months.
- The date each page was last modified.
- The relative importance of pages on your site. For example, your home page might have a relative importance of 1.0, category pages have an importance of 0.8, and individual blog entries or product pages have an importance of 0.5. This priority only indicates the importance of a particular URL relative to other URLs on your site, and doesn't impact the ranking of your pages in search results.
How Important Is a Good Site Map?
Having a good site map allows your visitors to easily find all your site's important information pages. Without a good site map, many of your visitors will get lost and simply leave! The link to your site map should be very obvious and easy to find. Some users rely on your site map to navigate around your site. Search engines can index all of your pages with a good site map. The access key to our site map is alt+s.
Are Links Important to a Good Website?
Every website needs to have at least one incoming link from another site, to be part of the World Wide Web. Understanding this, should explain why having many links to and from other sites is so important. Although there are several types of links, text links are the most valuable to search engines.
What Is SEO?
SEO is the process of developing, modifying, and analyzing your site so to enable search engines to read it, understand it and index it correctly. This is done by optimizing a web site, improving internal and external aspects in order to increase the traffic the web site receives from search engines
What Is HTML?
HTML is a computer language devised to allow website creation. These websites can then be viewed by anyone else connected to the Internet. It is relatively easy to learn, with the basics being accessible to most people in one sitting; and quite powerful in what it allows you to create. It is constantly undergoing revision and evolution to meet the demands and requirements of the growing Internet audience under the direction of the W3C, the organization charged with designing and maintaining the language.
The definition of HTML is HyperText Markup Language.
HyperText is the method by which you move around on the web (by clicking on special text called hyperlinks which bring you to the next page). The fact that it is hyper just means it is not linear ( i.e. you can go to any place on the Internet whenever you want by clicking on links); there is no set order to do things in.
Markup is what HTML tags do to the text inside them. They mark it as a certain type of text (italicized text, for example).
HTML is a Language, as it has code-words and syntax like any other language.
How does it work? HTML consists of a series of short codes typed into a text-file by the site author (these are the tags). The text is then saved as a html file, and viewed through a browser, like Internet Explorer. This browser reads the file and translates the text into a visible form, hopefully rendering the page as the author had intended. Writing your own HTML entails using tags correctly to create your vision. You can use anything from a rudimentary text-editor to a powerful graphical editor to create HTML pages
What Is a Valid Website?
A valid website is simply a site that was written correctly according to the rules developed by W3C. Most websites are not valid and will probably NEVER validate. Not an important website component to most web designers, because it requires some time, skill and knowledge.
What Is W3C?
W3C is the web standards and guidelines. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web (abbreviated WWW or W3).
What Is a User-Friendly Website?
A web site is user friendly if every site user can find and retrieve all the information they are looking for. For this to happen, a website needs to be accessible, easy to navigate, and provide high quality information.
What Is an Accessible Website?
An accessible website allows EVERYONE, regardless of their physical or mental abilities to access and use website information. Website accessibility is important to every business website.
What Is an E-Commerce Website?
E-commerce is a buzzword used to describe doing business on the internet or WWW. E-business is not quite as safe and simple as many business owners have discovered. Remember all the dotcom failures of the '90s?
What Is a Beautiful Website?
Often a costly business mistake! Many beautiful business websites fail to attract any new customers. Why? Search engines don't care what your site looks like. Search engines and users, want to find good business information sites. When describing a website, beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder.
What Is a Search Engine Friendly Website?
A search engine friendly site is generally EXACTLY the same as a user-friendly site. Every search engine advises web developers to design sites for users, not search engines. Most don't listen and try to fool search engines into ranking their sites higher than their information deserves. Many of these web sites get de-indexed!
What Is a Good Business Website?
A good business site will provide every website visitor with good information about the business activities, products, services, and history. Simply stated, good business websites answer customer questions before they're asked! Understanding and meeting customer needs is what every successful business owner already does. Publishing the right information on a good business site will make any website a profitable investment. Good page titles and good links help to create a user-friendly website design.
What Is an Optimized Website?
An optimized web site is simply a focused information website that has been properly written. There is no magic formula to building an optimized website. Just play by the WWW rules for good website design.
What Is an Award-Winning Website?
A website is about information, not beautiful images or design awards. Website awards are for designers' egos, and don't really mean much to anyone else. Your customers a looking to find good website information on your site. Although some may appreciate the look of your site, if it doesn't provide them with the answers they need, they'll leave anyway. Leave design awards to designers, and design a website for customers.
What Is a Bad Website?
A bad website takes up space on the web and provides no real information to anyone. Some website designers think that producing multiple copies of the same bad website design will improve their search engine rankings. These duplicate websites only serve the interests of the website designer. If a good website provides good and unique information to visitors, a bad website provides nothing but outdated or duplicated information. Bad websites usually have bad use of graphics, meta tags, poor navigation and useless hyperlinks. Bad websites never validate, are not accessible, but are very cheap to produce. Not the type of website you want designed for your business!
