Web Design for better ranking. (by FC)

Why do you visit a website, especially if you have already been there before? Is it to admire its clever graphics over and over again or to get information and updated material?

For business owners, unless you are prepared to set aside a nice budget for search engine ranking, you should avoid having a graphic only welcome page – even an award winning one, or a front page using frames.

Most web designers, fail to realise that search engines do not look at pretty pictures or clever Flash videos. They search for words. Another point overlooked is that search engines are not made to serve websites but people like you searching for something. Therefore, the owners of these search engines are competing for your usage. The more popular they are, the more they make.

They try to get you what you are looking for as closely and as quickly as they can. They rank higher the sites they think you want. Relevancy is what they are looking for. After all, that's exactly what you want too. They have to make a quick guess by matching the sites' content to the words used in your request. It's all to do with words! Of course, sites placed right at the top are the ones paying the most regardless of content but on keywords supplied by those sites.

When making searches you should give the search engines a helping hand by narrowing your request to a certain type or locality.

There are very many web design programs available both ranging from free to US$400, the best known and also the most expensive being offerings from Adobe and Microsoft but I advise caution in using some of these easy-to-use software. You are locked in to their systems.

The majority of these programs (the major 2 included) do not generate easily editable HTML code that you or someone else can edit using other programs or editor. Furthermore, they do not produce pages that will help you make an impact on search engines.

If you are planning a website for your business, the first point you should consider is its purpose. If all you want is a site simply for your customers to check prices and to place orders, then you do not need to go for ranking. But then, who doesn't want more business?

For sure, our high ranking in searches have brought us new and continued business. Considering the fact that it normally costs us around AUD$600 to get a new customer using the traditional marketing/adverting method, to have new customers walking in because of free good search engine ranking is a real boost.

To build your own website, be prepared to spend several good days on the project. Be careful to use software that produce editable websites. I recommend CoffeeCup's HTML Editor which costs only US$49. Don't be frightened by the “HTML” in its name. It's free to try and worth giving it a go. Another program which seems to produce good code is WebPlus which you can download absolutely free from the freeserifsoftware website. My favourite OpenOffice (featured in last month's issue – article available on our website) produces high quality html code but is not as specialised as the other two, hence requiring more tweaking to get best results.

www.coffeecup.com

www.freeserifsoftware.com

I will be very happy to get readers' views of the software they are using and opinions on the above programs. We have been designing and maintaining our own websites since 1997 always using HTML, and for the past 5 years, exclusively in the Linux environment, using the combination of OpenOffice, Mozilla and Quanta.

For the production of this magazine, the articles are written using OpenOffice. The text then gets pasted into CorelDraw for the printed version and pasted into Mozilla for the Web version. Images are then imported. Quanta, a terrific HTML editor, is then used to smarten up the page.

adexpress@fcproductions.com.au