BUILD A SUCCESSFUL WEBSITE

GATHERING YOUR INFORMATION

Your designer wants to build a great website for your business. Designing the visual aspects of the site can be fun, and the look of your website definitely contributes to the user experience. But there's more to making a site successful - it needs to be easy to use and easy to find. The information you provide is very important to the eventual success of the site.

A website that is easy to navigate is one that is clearly planned from the start. This is done by creating a list of the pages that need to be on the site and deciding how they are going to link to each other. Your customers don't want to do a lot of clicking about to find what they need, so plan to get them where they want to go in a direct and logical manner.

To understand how to make a site search-engine friendly, think about the goal of a search engine such as Google. Google's success depends on it's ability to sift through the information on millions of sites and bring only the most relevant to the top of the list. Your job is to make sure your information is presented in a search engine-friendly manner so that your site appears at or near the top of the list for relevant searches.

Here are some of the types of useful information you can give to your designer.

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A LIST OF POSSIBLE PAGES FOR THE SITE

How many pages might your site require? Make a list for your web designer. It can be helpful to look at the sites of your competitors.

Here are some examples of pages that appear on many sites:

• A home page to introduce your business and direct people quickly to the information they are seeking.
  
  
• A page describing your goods and services in more detail. If there is a lot of information, you might have a page per main category.
  
  
• An 'About Us' page telling your customers about the business. This can include a bio, some history of the business, etc.
  
  
• An FAQ or 'Frequently Asked Questions' page. This is a very useful to answer all the questions you are asked on a constant basis about your business and policies.
  
  
• A 'Contact Us' page, listing all the ways people can get in touch with you.

The goal is to get the user to the information he wants as quickly as possible and to make any navigation (links, drop down menus, etc.) easy to find.

Consider how your list of pages will link to each other. Will they all link from the homepage? Can you group certain pages together under one category?

Other features to consider are images, email or newsletter sign-ups, blogs, shopping carts, site searches, and media such as podcasts and video.

A website can be updated at any time, so every feature you'd like to add doesn't need to be ready all at once. However, knowing that some of these features may be added in the future will gave the designer a chance to plan ahead.

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KEYWORDS & SEARCH TERMS

Assemble a list of possible words and search terms that customers might use to find you.

These keywords and search terms will be in the code of the site, and listing them helps you focus the text of your site. These words should be used in the text, links and image names throughout the site.

Here are some of my keywords, as an example:

illustrator, illustration, editorial, logo, design, artist, artwork, vector, digital, graphic, designer, elizabeth, whelan, marthas, vineyard, business, solutions, services, print, packaging, label, book, woodcut, linocut, printmaking, news, graphics, portfolio, watercolor, gouache, advertising, brochure, web, childrens, promotions, hire, freelance, Tisbury, Vineyard Haven, Oak Bluffs, Edgartown, Massachusetts

At one time these keywords were very important to search engines when grouped as such in what’s known as the metadata of your site. Nowadays many search engines ignore them in that location and look for them instead in other descriptive text on your site. However, it doesn’t hurt to have the keywords in the code, and assembling them in a list will help with writing the other text elements of your site.

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WRITE A GOOD DESCRIPTION OF YOUR SITE

Create a 1 or 2 sentence description of your business and site.

This description will appear under your domain name when someone searches on a term and you came up as one of the relevant sites. Only the first part of your description will actually show to the viewer in a search results list, so put the important stuff there! The entire description is read by the search engine, but the on-screen display will be truncated.

Here's mine as an example:

"Illustrator Elizabeth Whelan provides illustration and graphic design services, creating distinctive artwork for your business, print and web needs. View images from her portfolio, read articles, get marketing advice, find out more information about the artist and her capabilities. Read her blog for news and views from the island of Martha’s Vineyard"

Note how the most important information is in the first sentence. The description also uses the most important keywords and search terms.

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WRITE THE TEXT (THE COPY) FOR THE SITE

CONTENT IS KING! Well-written, descriptive copy on your site will do the most for your ranking.

What do you need? At a minimum, write an introductory paragraph or two for the home page. This needs to entice a potential customer to buy from you. Write about the benefits of your products and services as well as the features.

You may want to write a bio or company history for an About Us page, and a small amount of text for each of your other pages, using the keywords throughout.

(If you have a graphics heavy site like mine, plan on using the Alt Text (see below) and page titles to do much of the search term work.)

To take it to the next level, include articles, how-to’s, and other useful information for your site visitors. This will help them see that you are knowledgeable in your field and it will provide many opportunities for you to repeat your important keywords and search terms.

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ADD DESCRIPTIVE PAGE TITLES

Another place to put some descriptive information is in the page titles.These are the page names that come up at the top of your browser when you go to different sites and if the web designer has been thorough, they will change as you access different pages.

Only the first words may show in your browser, but the search engines will still read them all.

An example of a home page title is :

Elizabeth R. Whelan - Illustrator and Graphic Designer - Marthas Vineyard - illustration, graphic design and logo artwork portfolio

Using your keywords, write descriptive page titles for the different pages in your site.

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ORGANIZE YOUR IMAGES

Scan in and assemble all your images and sort them by the categories in which they will appear on the site. If you are not familiar with scanning and preparing images for a website, your designer may do this for you.

Name the images in a logical and search-friendly manner. This means instead of calling an image ‘001234shot1.jpg’, you would name this image ‘blue_crystal_vase_vintage.jpg’ . It takes a while to name your images in this manner, but the work will pay off in the long run.

Some people like to search by image so that they can see if you have the product they are looking for without having to dig through a lot of site pages. They enter their search terms and then click on an image to go to the website upon which it appears. Well-named images create a new way for customers to find you.

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WRITE ALT TEXT (ALT TAGS) FOR THE IMAGES

Alt text is generally seen as these nifty little words that sometimes come up in a yellow box if you hover over an image for a few seconds on a site. (May not be visible in all browsers.)

These days Alt text (short for Alternate) is standard for web design as it allows information about the graphics to be accessible even when the image cannot be seen for some reason, such as on a non-graphics system or by a visually impaired person using a screen reader. Alt text should be descriptive and use your keyword information, such as ‘illustration showing camel sitting in desert in Jordan’.

Alt text also helps considerably with your search engine optimization.

Writing out a list of alt text to appear with your images will help your web designer create a very search-engine friendly site.

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YOUR HARD WORK WILL HELP YOUR RANKING

Whether you are building your own site or helping a designer create one for you, gathering this information up front will make for a more user-friendly site and will greatly increase your chances of being seen as relevant when your potential customers search for you on the web.

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This article was edited by Gwyn McAllister, copywriter and journalist.
Let a wordsmith polish your text! Contact her via email at gwynmca@comcast.net