Designing your own Website
Always try to make your site interesting and unique, but remember your design should be appealing to visitors and search engines.
With an ever-increasing and bewildering amount of websites available in any particular area your site will have to be good enough to encourage visitors to come in and spend some time. We'll look at the various ways to make your site both interesting and interactive in just a moment, but first I want to introduce you to the two most important principles of good web design:
1. Your site must be search engine friendly
Make it your number one priority to make your site as search engine friendly as you can. To do this you will not only need to include key words in the main text of your site, but you'll also need to include keyword meta tags in your HTML coding.
Try also to make your domain name relevant to what you're selling online as search engines also search under domain names. However, depending on the area that you're going to operate in, this isn't that easy as the obvious domain names will probably already be taken.
Before adding key words to your site be careful that your site actually contains content relating to these key words. When search engine spiders, or worse still editors, visit your site they will be unlikely to list it if it doesn't bear any relation to your key words.
If, for example, you have a site selling camping gear and you include in your key words 'maps', 'guides', 'camping directories', 'camp sites', but your site doesn't actually contain any of these things you're in trouble. Not only are you running the risk of not being included anywhere by search engines, but equally importantly even if you are listed and visitors come to your site having searched under 'camping directories' they will rightly expect that this is, amongst other things, what you are offering. The chances of them staying in, let alone buying from a site that clearly isn't what it says it is, is highly unlikely.
2. You site must be visitor friendly
It's amazing how website owners think that visitors to their site want to be bombarded by music or other silly gimmicks like annoying things flying around the screen and getting in the way of seeing what the site has to offer.
If you're ever tempted to include music, remember this. Most work places in the country now have Internet access and I know from previous experience working in a large office that employees often spend time surfing the net when they should be doing other things. But what happens if your music blares out of their speakers?
Music and over-reliance on pop-up ads, gaudy colour schemes and poorly structured pages, will drive visitors away from your site in seconds. Once they're gone, that's it.
When coming up with a suitable design for your website try to keep it simple so that it's:
• easy to navigate, which includes providing a navigation bar on all your pages;
• easy to read - the colour of the text doesn't clash with the background colour of the page;
• free from large graphics that take time to download.
Spend time looking at as many websites as you can. Save the ones you like in your favourites folder. When you feel you have exhausted your search go back through them and start pruning your list. Strike off those that don't immediately grab you and then keep on going until you are left with about three or four websites that you really like, and build or model your own around their design.
