web design
As a web site owner you have about 10 seconds to get your message across to your users before they click away, not having found the information they're after. Keep this in mind as you surf the net and look at sites with this is mind. Browse sites with similar objectives to yours and consider how well they get their message across. That's about 10 seconds worth by the way.
How do you start when thinking about the design of a web site to sell your service or business? It's really useful to understand a bit about what makes a good quality web site and not to base your judgement solely on what you see on the screen. Yes, appearance is important but it's actually the coding behind the scenes that is more important if your site is going to work well in search engine ranking.
search engine friendly web site design
Clean design, clear navigation, valid HTML and CSS code combine to deliver web sites that are favoured by search engines. Standards in web site design, as with many businesses, are there to establish protocols for quality workmanship. Web site designers of merit value the importance of running checks at various stages of the build to make sure the site they are building conforms to Standards.
So, there's more to designing a web site than you might think. There is a lack of consistency between Browsers meaning that they don't render web pages to users in exactly the same way. This causes display and functionality issues you've probably experienced?
helping users get the best from your site
Google guidelines advise "The best way to make sure that your web site pages appear correctly in all browsers – or in all future browsers is to make sure your pages are designed using valid HTML and CSS".
When you look at a site you should ask yourself how a person with sight issues would be able to access the information using a screen reader? For example, if there is a distinct lack of text it's going to be a challenge! Web sites should be accessible to a wide range of users and shouldbe designed using W3C guidelines. Visit www.w3.org/WAI/quicktips/Overview.php to find out more about this.
site validation
W3C validation can help with search engine ranking. Businesses can achieve high ranking without validation if they have a large budget for paid Search Engine Optimization (SEO), together with a high volume of links from other sites. If you are a company with a small budget for paid SEO, like Google Ads, the difference a validated site could make to search engine rankings can be considerable. Check out web sites for yourself to see if they validate. http://validator.w3.org and http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/.
web design checklist
Page content needs to be relevant to the page title as this will help in getting your pages noticed by Search Engines.
Images need to be optimized for the web so their file size is small so pages don't take too long to load, especially important for users who don't have high speed internet access.
Flash (moving image presentations) should be avoided, especially on the home page. Flash is often more appealing to a site owner than to site users and can quickly become irritating. Additionally, these visual presentations may not be accessible to users relying on a screen reader, or users with a slow internet connection who have to wait a long time for the images to load, resulting in them possibly leaving the site.
Compatibility of display is important whether between different platforms (PC or Mac) or across the range of browsers (IE 6, 7, 8, Safari, Firefox, Opera, Chrome etc).