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Planning
and building your website (cont'd)
Images
Whether electronically stored or scanned from brochures,
we'll need access to the images you want on your site - preferably
with clear notes on what images are to go on what pages. But beware!
Browsers have to download every item on the page before they can
be seen. And downloading takes time. So, the more images you have
on the page, the longer the download time. There is a time and
a place in web design for plain, text-heavy sites that load fast
and provide plain information, as there is for slightly slower-to-load,
but more visually appealing pages. What's your priority?
Copy
Often overlooked, it's extremely important that the text on your
site is easy to read and really does its job - whether that's
selling products or providing information. We can help you if
you need to write good copy for your site. If you're happy with
all your copy, it is best supplied to us electronically (as a
Word or RTF file). Try to ensure there are at least 200 words
of copy for each page (this will help with search engine optimisation).
Copy is also critically important
on a website because, more and more, search engines are using
the copy content to analyse the relevance - and subsequent ranking
- of a web page. Search engine optimisation is a big area to cover,
but, suffice to say, poorer copy is likely to lead to a poorer
ranking, fewer hits and fewer leads. Keywords and phrases need
to appear in the right places to stand a chance of getting a high
ranking. More about that in Search
engines and Search engine Optimisation
Key words/phrases
This is only relevant when the site is submitted to the search
engines, but start thinking about what words and phrases your
would-be customers will be typing in when they want to find your
company. If you wanted to buy a tennis racket what would you type
in for a search? Tennis racket? Tennis? Sports equipment? Sports
shops? We'll need to jointly come up with a list of keywords for
every page of your website.
Be specific. If you do a search
on "sports equiment" through Yahoo, you'll get 17,000,000
results back. So not much chance of getting in the top ten there
then. But that's a bit of a vague search isn't it? If someone
lives in Newcastle and is looking for a tennis racket, they'd
bemore likely to type in something like "sports shops, Newcastle".
So get more specific and try to get ranked highly in more specific
fields, rather than trying to beat the odds.
Analyse the leaders! Do a search
on the keywords you'd like to be found by and see who's in the
top ten You can use the "view source code" option in
your browser to see what keywords and phrases they've used. But
bear in mind this is no instant key to success alone. High ranking
depends on a complex number of criteria.
Links
Links from your site to other relevant sites (and, more importantly,
vice versa) are VERY IMPORTANT. They can bring traffic to your
site. They can provide extra useful information to visitors. They
are also an increasingly important method of search
engines ranking your pages. So start thinking about relevant
sites that it might be useful to try and gets links to and from
- allied businesses, trade associations and relevant portal sites
(but not
link farms). The emphasis here is on the word relevant. You'll
only realy score with incoming links from popular sites that are
allied to your business. These links can be built over time, but
it's good to be thinking about any immediate reciprocal links
possibilities.
Pulling it all together...
Once we've got this information,
we'll come up with some design ideas - rough page layout styles
showing how the main template of the site would look. Depending
on the complexity of the project, this can take anything from
a couple of days to a couple of weeks. When we've agreed a layout
style, we'll put a sample page together and put it on a test site
for you to look at, usually within a week. When that's confirmed
as being OK, we'll work up the rest of the pages. So within four
weeks (sometimes two), your site will be complete.
The next steps....
Once your site is complete we'll help you;
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