Step 1: An Introduction to Website Design

Nearly all websites exist to make their owners money and in order to do this, two properties must come together - good search ranking so visitors can find you and good content to persuade them to contact you.

Neither a high ranking with an awful website nor great content at #155 in Google will work. Only 30% of visitors go to Google's second page. The rest will find what they want in the top ten results or refine their search terms. So, focus the website, write good content and put it in a pleasing package.

• Step 2: Planning Your Website
• Step 3: Your Website's Appearance
• Step 4: Lay out Your Website for Usability
• Step 5: Content Editing
• Step 6: Search Cues
• Step 7: Testing
• Step 8: Publishing
• Step 9: Maintaining Your Website
• Step 10: Adding Value to Your Website
• Step 11: Then what makes a Good website?
• Never Forget your Visitors!
• Getting to Know Your Visitors
• Resource Areas
• Is Your Website Performing?

Step 2: Planning Your Website

The Purpose of Your website?

Quite simply, it is to bring you business.

To be successful, a website must attract visitors, engage them and encourage them to act in a way that benefits your business.

Are you selling a product, a service, displaying information or generating leads? Whatever it is, it must be found and digested as quickly as possible.

What is Your Target Audience?

Is it predominantly male, female, young, old, corporate? Your website must focus and project an appropriate ambience they will understand and with which they will interact.

If your audience is 50+ - easy to read. If it is corporate - restrained colours. If it is rural communities, ensure that pages download quickly for them.

Warthog Web Design takes great care to listen to clients' needs and then articulates those needs into a functional website.

Decide on the purpose of the website before any design work is done.

Step 3: Your Website's Appearance

For many, this is the first step, however, if time is spent on deciding on the purpose of your website, ideas about it's appearance could be revised.

There are many impressive website designs, but they may not fit your own business. Your design should be subtle, yet unique.

A common mistake is to fill the design with vivid colour which overwhelms the visitor and makes it more difficult to draw his eye to items of interest. An even worse mistake is to create a first page that consists of nothing but a fancy graphic. Search engines and visitors hate these.

A space of approximately 1000 x 550 pixels is the average visitor's screen 'real estate'. These half million pixels are worth - literally - millions. You must get your message acoss in this small space.

Navigation is a critical. It must be explanatory, logical and simple. Labyrinthine, arcane and ambiguous navigation is the death of many websites.

Many websites use sophisticated, drop-down/fold out menus that don't demonstrate which sections will expand and don't tell the visitor which pages he has been to and those which he has yet to visit.

Step 4: Lay out Your Website for Usability

A delightful appearance, focussed content that is search engine friendly is not enough if it is all over the show.

Visitors won't read your web pages - at least not initially. They will skim them looking for keywords that might interest them. Only then will they actually read the content. Visitors skim an 'F' shape : all the first paragraph, the left side of the second paragraph and the left side of the third paragraph. If none f their keywords are found in the three passages of text, he will move on.

Monolithic blocks of small text are practically illegible and are seen on many websites. The philosophy seems to be - the more we can squeeze onto a page, the more our visitors will learn about what we do.

Paragraphs should be small, tight 'text bites' and broken up at appropriate intervals. Don't use right justified text - it's difficult to read.

Little use is made on many pages of white space to separate content and draw the reader's eye to other parts of the page.

Printing - simple enough but there are too many websites with spidery text on dark backgrounds and printouts that lose half the content.

Warthog Web Design has designed many websites and avoids these common mistakes by ensuring that the pages are easy to assimilate. Our Web Content Editing service also looks at the layout of your pages.

Step 5: Content Editing

So, your content is in your website, its looking good. Time to sit back?

No, Mark Twain was right ("The only good word is a deleted word"). Relook at the content and make sure that its relevant, organized and readable. Use someone who is new to the website who will pick up typos, grammatical errors and ambiguities.

Pages are often far too long, forcing repeated scrolling. If the content is good, visitors won't mind too much but if its poor and they have to scroll, they will quickly lose interest and leave.

If a page has to be long, a small summary table should be provided at the top of the page linking to the page's main points.

The search engine Google looks for keywords/key phrases entered by a potential visitor and displays the first instance of it with surrounding text in its search results list.

What sort of text are your keywords surrounded by? Will they make sense to someone looking at Google's search results?

Warthog Web Design's Content Editing service ensures your message is articulated and that key phrases are surrounded by relevant text.

Step 6: Search Cues

The quality of content both as recognized by your visitors and search engines is important but only part of the whole story.

META tags are invisible to visitors but tell search engines which are important keywords/phrases and what the purpose of the page is. Much is made of META tags but Google ignores them completely.

Other search engines do not and META tags have to be completed skilfully. Many websites give search engines no help whatsoever.

In the contentf, there are many opportunities to help a search engine along with hidden tags.

Google looks at the TITLE tag (the text that appears in the browser titlebar), the content, hidden tags and finally, at your 'link popularity'. In other words, how many websites link to you. The more the better.

Many websites are still HTML based. Massive amounts of HTML code confuse search engines (and add to download times).

Warthog Web Design uses style sheet-based pages that are fast and contain little code so that the content of the page is very visible to search engines. We also offer a Search Engine Optimization service.

Step 7: Testing

Sounds obvious but with the variety of constantly changing variables on the Internet, it is essential.

Check whether all the links work. Broken links damage credibility.

Secondly, does the website display well in major browsers? 96% of visitors will use Interent Explorer or Mozilla.

Thirdly, the website should display well both on a PC and on an Apple computer.

Warthog Web Design ensures that its websites are standards compliant and display well on all major browsers.

Step 8: Publishing

Not quite yet.

Warthog Web Design publishes your draft website to a temporary directory so you can see how it is progressing.

Slow pages are the single biggest complaint from Internet users. Text does not slow pages down but we need to ensure that there are no unnecessary images.

Can pictures be compressed more? Do we need all those pictures? Do they contribute to the website other than by increasing the download time?

Can the code be trimmed more? What speed increase can we gain by compressing the page?

Now its time to publish your website and have your launch party.

Next, you need to know how well it is doing. Who is visiting, are their numbers going up? Who is making return visits, where in the website are they spending most time? 'Hits' give no idea of the quality of your visitors.

Step 9: Maintaining Your Website

Big mistake - some companies forget about their website once it is published. Business will surely pour in.

The purpose of a website is to generate traffic - visitors - to get them to return and to convert the visits into business.

Let us design and maintain your website - you get all design costs back and more.

Maintain your website, add new content, new photos, updated specs, tighten any loose ends and to add extra value. And of course let your clients know.

And, very importantly, tuning the search engine cues in the pages to get higher rankings. Search engine rankings are transient and change by the hour as new websites are indexed by the engines.

All websites need to be compared with the competition and tuned and refined at regular intervals to maintain and increase search rankings.

Warthog Web Design offers two options for website maintenance - contract or when needed at economical rates and we suggest strongly that maintenance be part of your budget in addition to web design and hosting.

Step 10: Adding Value to Your Website

Adding value can take many forms. Some, like adding Flash animation and extra graphics will come at the expense of download time and hence, usability. Others, however, do not.

There is massive competition out there and the goal is to get your website firstly to be picked out and secondly, recognized by visitors as something special.

One way of doing this is to add a resource area to your website where you talk about matters related to your work and perhaps provide visitors with links to more helpful pages. More repeat traffic = more business + higher search rankings.

Another is to add a News page with all the latest events. Beware however that this is a long term commitment and has to be kept up to date. The same thing applies to eZine newsletters. If you choose to publish one, make sure that you have something to say and that it is kept topical.

If you have additional information not suitable for the Internet, add a Contact form so that interested visitors can ask for it and you can find out more about them along the way.

Step 11: Then what makes a Good website?

• Great content - relevant, terse, informal, no poor grammar or typos.
• Clever content layout - legible and logical.
• Sensible, descriptive navigation.
• Good use of graphics and colours - augmenting and not distracting.
• Minimal coding and fast graphics for fast page downloading.
• Establishing credibility with your visitor.
• Full search engine optimization - integrated with point One.

Never Forget your Visitors!

No matter how attractive or technically sophisticated your website is, if your visitors have to wait, they will leave. There's plenty of competition.

• Pages taking over 8 seconds to download will lose 30% of visitors.
• Visitors must get the essence of a page within 6 seconds.
• If your visitors become lost in your website, they will certainly leave.
• If there are broken links, your credibility is compromised.
• If there are typographic mistakes, can your visitor trust your business?

• Our websites are hand coded to the latest web standards.
• Site navigation is logical and helpful.
• All website links and body text are triple checked.
• Graphics are slick, fast, professional - no cheap clip art here.
• Content is edited (option) for maximum reader absorption speed.

Your message is conveyed clearly and grasped quickly by your visitors. Graphics and content deliver maximum impact and unique website signature.

We can work to your specifications or you can let us loose with guidelines in the sure knowledge that your website will be attractive and functional.

• Approximately how many pages do you want?
• Do you need the website updated frequently (i.e. daily/weekly)?
• Do you need a logo designed?
• Do you already have a website - if so, the address will be useful.
• If you do, what do you feel is wrong with it?
• Do you have the address of a competitor's website?
• Do you have the address of a website that you admire? It doesn't have to be in the same field.
• Do you need ecommerce?
• Do you need search engine optimization?
• Do you require server log analysis?

Getting to Know Your Visitors

Forms are the principal interactive instrument of the Internet yet little attention is given to their human side. The way in which you request information through a form tells your visitor a lot about you.

• Only request information that is essential.
• Never ask for a name if it is not needed.
• If it is useful, add a space for a name but mark it clearly 'optional'.
• Make the form easy to complete.
• People hate forms so make yours fun - add a 'Rate this website'/'Why did you visit our website?' section for instance. The feedback will be useful.
• State why you need this information and what your Privacy Policy is.

Resource Areas

A Resource Area demonstrates you care about your area of expertise enough to share it with others and is a sure way of attracting repeat visitors. This can take the form of a 'Useful Links' page with short descriptions to show that you have recommended them.

The resource area can be expanded into a glossary of terms, a history of the discipline and anything else you wish. If it is really useful, it will get linked to and will improve your search engine rankings dramatically.

• A glossary of terms.
• A history of the subject with expectations for the future.
• A list of links that you can recommend.
• Addresses of local contacts.
• Some newsy items.
• Books on your subject.

• Is your website content current, comprehensive, well written and useful?
• Does your content have a 'personal touch'?
• Is your website free of typos?
• Do all your links work?
• Is your navigation system descriptive and logical?
• Is your website user friendly?
• Are your forms non-intrusive?
• Is your use of colours restrained?
• Have you given a full street/postal address?

Is Your Website Performing?

Spending a fortune on website design in no way guarantees it will be at all successful. Here are some pointers that indicate how well your website may do:

• Pages taking over 8 seconds to download will lose 30% of visitors.
• Visitors must understand the nature of your business within 6 seconds.
• If your visitors become lost in your website, they leave.
• If there are broken links, your credibility is compromised.
• If there are typographic mistakes, can your visitor trust your business?

• Does your website reflect the reason for which you had the website designed?
• Are you paying more than R250 a month just for hosting?
• Do you know how many visitors a day your website gets?
• How many enquiries do you get through your website?
• Do you know where your website ranks in popular search engines?
• Do visitors ever compliment you on your website?
• How often do you update your website?

Let us take a look at your website and make some suggestions to increase it's functionality.