The time-honored maxim-“all that glitters is not gold” is perfectly applicable to the online realm with its countless myriad of websites. To put it in perspective, a website or a portal that impresses you at first sight because of its design will be able to catch and rivet your attention if and only if its content is as striking as the graphics. Surprisingly enough, you’ll come across URL links (of/on any search topic) that appear much lower on a particular page of a search engine (read search engine ranking page) compared to others although the former (the higher ranked ones) have a minimalist UI interface!
The fact that websites which are able to strike a harmonious balance between (website) design and SEO content (of course the credit goes to the webmasters) are the blue-eyed boys in the eyes of search engines as well as users, always. If you want your site to get a good enough rank (to keep it commercially viable or web-world relevant), then you must pay equal attention to both the ‘design’ and ‘content’ aspects. To hit the nail on the head as succinctly as possible, visitors to your site should get what they see. Go through these guidelines and make the most of them if you want your site to stay ahead of the pack.
Don’t follow the beaten track
For years, website designers and developers along with the promoters or businessmen have succumbed to the ‘website design first’ trap and continue to. Designing and developing a website from scratch is surely more alluring than creating SEO as that’s where all the fun lies. So, it’s no wonder that webmasters just cannot resist the temptation of focusing on the design part as a priority. The SEO structure is developed or created based on the design interface or features, more as an afterthought.
Majority, of the website developers are ensnared by this tendency which has taken deep roots. If you can dare not to follow the beaten track, you can bet that you’ll be in for a pleasant surprise. If you’re really sincere about maximizing revenues from your online store, then first focus on having the search engine optimized content in place. See to it that the webmaster accords the same weightage to content marking as he or she does to fonts, layout, CSS, colors, HTML, JavaScript, and so on.
Engage a specialist
The need and significance of finding the appropriate specialist stem from the first guideline. A cursory or casual search will throw up web design and development experts or specialists most of whom will be stereotyped to view the developmental task (of the website) from a design-oriented aspect. These are the design professionals who become easy prey to the design-first imbroglio.
You’ll have to steer clear of such web developers who think their job is done the moment they design a platform that is the digital equivalent of a graphic brochure or pamphlet. Fine-tune your search by looking for a web designer for whom devising appropriate SEO is as or equally integral as laying out the design.
Stay in the loop
Numerous businessmen and entrepreneurs have realized and paid for the folly of blindly trusting the webmasters when it came to website design. Web developers, more often than not, create an invisible impregnable wall of mysteriousness around them to give the feeling that what they’re dealing with is something very nebulous or abstruse that the laymen won’t be able to figure out.
But then you don’t need to be a webmaster to figure out that designing a site is not rocket science. Blindly trusting the specialist could be akin to committing hara-kiri as the designer could be someone who’s just well-versed in the basic codes necessary to create a frugal site and host the same. To be on the safe side, pick up some elementary web design and development know how.