Web Site Design and Internet Marketing: A Few Basics

You are ready to build your website and your home page design is thought out. Here are a few basic tips:
Keep your pages flexible. Allow room for growth, to include extra items for your menus, to add new content, to remov or change content, pictures, etc. One should really have a long term plan for how you want your website to look in one or two or more years’ time. However you can’t always foresee what new products, technology or lifestyles are there around the next corner. So be safe and allow room.
Avoid inconsistency in the layout of your various pages. If customers find the navigation aids on the left in a particular shape or colour on one page, they should be in the same position, shape and colour on all the pages. I’ve never yet heard of anyone who enjoys playing hide and seek with navigation aids. People are visiting your site to find the product or service they are looking for, not to admire your ingenuity in hiding things. Make them comfortable and relaxed and they will concentrate on shopping! When you insert content, don’t enclose it in a frame. This interferes with access by Google ‘crawlers’ to your site.
When you have laid out your website, go through it objectively and see whether there is anything that doesn’t have a purpose or add to the look or usefulness of your pages. Be sure that everything is relevant. Don’t fill up empty spaces with pretty pictures, quotations, poems, etc that have no bearing on your business but inserted just because you thought they were cute or funny or smart, or touching, or simply because you don’t like empty spaces!
If you have knowledge of cascading style sheets (CSS), this system does a lot of the above things automatically. The headaches of learning about CSS are probably far outweighed by the headaches of inexperienced site building and the tricky and clumsy maintenance of your site.
Cascading Style Sheets: This very scary concept is vital for you to learn about. It will prevent you making early mistakes in design and layout, and enable you to make changes in your website later on without taking it to pieces and starting from scratch. It is vital to make it ‘crawler friendly’, that is, make it more accessible to the ‘spiders’ sent from Google to seek out keywords, content quality and relevance, and other things that can help you to move from 10,000th in the ratings to front page of Google.
It basically separates the content from the presentation information. The presentation is the layout of the website; the colours, pictures, graphics, etc and the content is the articles, information for the customers, etc, written in HTML. Tools, such as textfixer.com, are available online to convert your text to HTML code for your website. CSS also allows you to share the formatting of the home page with multiple other pages.
Bear in mind that there are hundreds of ‘templates’, standard website layouts, some in CSS format, available for your use on the internet. Many of them are extremely attractive too.