With the Works

Archive for September, 2008

I’ve decided that I should redesign my website. Truthfully, I rarely look at it and when I do, I just want to redo the whole thing. Remember that famous line, “The shoemaker’s son always goes barefoot”? Well, the same thing applies to many small webdesign businesses.

With only one or two people doing all the work, our own websites are too often just a reflection of what we did 2 or 3 years ago.

Given the way webdesign trends change over time, web designers need to update often. We have to start thinking like those in the fashion industry, after all, if our own sites are not cutting-edge, how can we expect our clients to update theirs?

I have to ask myself, “Does my current site represent what I can do?” With the ever-changing technical advances in this industry, is it possible to show what you might do next? I might learn a new technique using CSS, or buy new software that allows me to do something new with graphics or animation. So, nothing I do will ever truly represent what I will be capable of in the future. So I need to make sure my site is at least a reflection of what is current in design and what I do best right now.

Like the fashion industry, what’s hot now may not be in 6 months. It comes down to this – try to create a design that is classic and it will never go out of style (that’s what my Mother always says).

The best article I came across suggested that you really think about why you need a redesign. Ask yourself, “what will that actually accomplish?” What is the site not doing now? If, for example, it’s not getting noticed, improved SEO will go a long way to making a positive change. The more I think about this, the more I think I should just get rid of my site and replace it with this blog! After all, what I do best is make fast changes and create WP themes and graphics. Yes, I’ve decided to do it-today!

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about my friend’s blog causing her to feel pressure to write for an audience. (Pressure) The other day she told me that she noticed that her site was coming up much higher in Google search results than it did before we added the blog to the site.

Looking at her stats, she noticed people had come to her site after using the search words “Selmer sax”. To find out where she ranked using those terms, she did a google search for “Selmer Sax”. To her surprise, her site came up on the first page of results. Impressive, considering Google found
about 665,000 results for Selmer sax.

As her web designer, I did not make Search Engine Optimization a huge priority (it was a personal website I did as a favour) so I know that other SEO things could have been done, so the question is: why does Google rank her site so high?

Google gives a few tips to web designers to help them design sites that rank higher. Here’s what they say on their site:

Design and content guidelines

• Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
• Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
• Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
• Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images.

They go on to give a list of things you should not do (if you want them to rank your site highly):

Quality guidelines – basic principles

• Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.
• Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking.”
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you.
• Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”

So, it would seem that we have done everything we should and nothing we shouldn’t when it comes to SEO. If her site was an online store, she’d have it made!

A few weeks ago someone from Google left a nice comment on the blog, so it appears that Google employees check sites identified by bots to make sure the content is high quality material and worthy of a higher ranking.

The way to get a higher ranking with search engines is to make sure your site is well-written, relevant to your audience, updated regularly, and informative or entertaining. In short, make your site a credible source of information.