Building a better web site

A reworked web design on its own will bring not one single extra visitor to your web site. Are you looking in the right place to improve your web presence?

It's a sobering thought, and businesses wondering why they are not getting more enquiries through their web sites will often put the need for a redesign at the top of list.

But web design, the design and building of an effective website, is about a whole lot more than just the imagery and graphics of the user interface.

Web design and content management

We all recognise the importance of search engines in helping potential customers find our sites. Of course, search engines are entirely blind to site design. They do not see all the graphics and movies and other desgner page decoration, they just chew up the page content and then analyse the page in terms of its content.

Web designers used to spend a lot of time embedding hidden tags into pages and tieing themselves into knots in an effort to influence the search engines. But as the search engines have got smarter, the job of the web designer has actually got easier — you can't use those tricks anymore: a search engine simply looks at the words.

So (bad news for traditional web designers) it is the content of a page that determines how it a page analysed. And that is why being able to add content cheaply and easily at any time is so important.

If content is the king, then web site owners need to be able to take control of their own content... adding new stories, case studies, FAQs, background information. All content adds into what a search engine knows about your site— and no need for a web designer to break into a sweat.

• Here is a summary of how search engines analyse your pages.
• Look at the heading (the text along the top edge of your browser).
• Look at the important text on your page (headings, highlighted text etc).
• Index all the words on your page and rank each word in terms of number of times used and density on the page.

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