4.   Website Design (DIY or by a Professional Developer)

Getting a website designed is not that tricky, and most website owners take a shot at it, but the hard part is getting it right.
Website development has changed so much in the last 2-3 years that even a pro could be old news if he/she doesn’t keep up with the technology.
I remember when I designed my first website back in 2000. For me at that time it was a great achievement, taking in consideration that I never went to any web design courses. Black was in fashion, so my website had a black background.
Everything was done manually, in pure html (of course a lot of bad coding for me at that time), and every product had to have it’s own page done manually from scratch. Then I discovered “frames” (which now are mostly used to achieve other great features (AJAX) but highly not recommended for anything else), cutting the job in half.
Thank God I don’t have that website any-longer because I wouldn’t be able to sleep any-more.
Anyway, getting back to web design – It’s a job better left to the professionals that know what they are doing.
It’s not complicated to throw few images on the page, write some text, etc., but when you are looking to get better search engine rankings, all that throwing and writing doesn’t pay for it. The power of proper html tags helps a lot.
A spider visiting a website does not understand and see all that fancy style and catchy images, but pure text found inside the html tags.

Examples:
title tag – a piece of html code inserted in the <a href=’link’ title=’text here’>Link</a> tag to format a link that will take the user to a new page
alt tag – similar with the above but this time it goes inside the <img src=’img path’ alt=’text here’ /> image tag

These are the things that give you the short description when the mouse hovers over a link or image and helps search engines and users with screen readers to understand what it’s all about. They hold a strong position in search engine optimization and are just a few of the important things a good web developer knows.

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Tags: Website Design

This entry was posted on Monday, September 22nd, 2008 at 1:31 pm and is filed under SEO Tutorials, Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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