Article printed from SiteProNews: http://www.sitepronews.com
  HTML version available at: http://www.sitepronews.com/archives.html

Website Design That Works (Part 1)
By Kevin Gallagher (c) 2007

Introduction
Before you even think about opening Dreamweaver or your
favourite html editor and start designing your site there are
a few things I believe you need to do first. I am going to
describe how to increase your work flow and give you some
general tips and tricks that will speed up the design of your
website project and help to get it showing up in search engines
quicker. In future articles I will be going into greater detail
of some of the topics I describe here. Now let's get started.

Purchasing and Optimizing Your Domain Name
The first thing you need to consider is your domain name. I
suggest that you don't just use your company name, i.e. if your
company makes tartan paint and your company name is "Hamish
Paints" don't go for the obvious choice of hamishpaints.com. I
would try and come up with a keyword rich domain name. Some
search engine optimizers (SEO) would say that having keywords in
your domain name doesn't make any difference to your listings
but I disagree. Google will highlight your keywords in the
search engine results page (SERPS), which leads me to believe
that keywords do hold some weight, and besides it will make it
clearer to the searcher what your site is all about.

What are Keywords?
Keywords from a search engine optimization (SEO) stand point are
the key -words that are used to optimize your website for better
listings on search engines. These are the words or phrases
people are typing into the search bar of Google etc. to find
websites relating to what information or products they may be
looking for. Go to www.bruceclay.com/ (http://www.bruceclay.com/)
and www.highrankings.com/ (http://www.highrankings.com/) - two
great websites where you can learn more about keywords and SEO.

How Do I Find and Choose My Keywords?
To find keywords that people may be using in search terms the
first port of call should be the overture keyword selector tool
and you can access this tool at http://inventory.overture.com/
or http://inventory.uk.overture.com/. If you want the UK
results, here you will find an excellent tool for discovering
keywords. All you need to do is type in words or phrases that
are going to be related to your website and Overture will show
you related searches that include your term and how many times
that term was searched in the last month. Now you can get an
idea of what keywords you should be including in your domain
name.

Please note that search engines don't like long domain names so
try to keep it as short as possible. Other great resources for
keywords are:

http://www.wordtracker.com/
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/

As we all know, all the good domain names have been taken and
it's almost impossible to get one-word domain names these days,
so be inventive if you get stuck. I always find it helpful to
visit www.dictionary.com (http://www.dictionary.com/) and use
the thesaurus to come up with names maybe I hadn't thought of.
Now that you are armed with a killer domain name you can go to
http://www.umbrellawebsitedesign.co.uk/order/whois/ and check
its availability.

Try and get the domain name extension of the country your
company resides in as it makes it clear where you're from. I
know most people want to get a .com but, if you are in the UK,
I believe a better extension would be .co.uk as it shows where
you're from. This will also help in the SERPS. When people are
searching for websites in the UK you don't want to be competing
with websites outside of your country if you can help it.

Building a Holding Page and Creating a Site Map
Now that we are sorted with our domain name and hosting the next
step involves creating a holding page and submitting a sitemap
to Google. First of all you need to create your holding page.
It's a good idea to create a holding page so your domain can
build up some respect with search engines. You don't want to
wait until your website goes live before submitting it to search
engines.

Designing a Holding Page
Keep it simple and describe all the services and products you
may be offering in your site. Don't forget to use keyword rich
text in your title tag, description tags, and body text. Use the
keywords you discovered in the "how to find and choose keywords"
section. This is good practice for when you design your website
proper, but you have to remember it's unlikely this page will be
viewed by many people. However, this isn't the purpose of your
holding page.

A good idea here would be, if any visitors did visit your site,
perhaps they would like to know when your website goes live or
maybe they will have questions. I would therefore suggest you
add a simple contact form asking for their name and email
address to notify them when the site will be live or to answer
any questions they may have. You could even use them to do some
usability testing and describe in more detail the coming
sections. Name it index.html or index.htm and put it in the root
folder of your site and upload it to the server.

Creating a Sitemap for Google
A Google sitemap is a XML document that contains information of
every page on your website (not to be confused with a sitemap
html page on your website). You need to upload this to the root
folder of your server so that Google can access it and index
your website more quickly and easily. You can create a Google
sitemap with very little effort online by going to
http://www.sitemapspal.com/ and following the online
instructions. Once you have created your site map you can go to
www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ and follow Google's
instructions for adding a site map. You will find this service
very easy to use and invaluable in getting your website listed
properly on Google. Remember to update your sitemap XML document
when your website is finished and every time you make changes so
that Google can index your new pages. Doing this now will save
you time and effort later.

Now Submit Your Website to the Major Search Engines - Right?
Wrong! It's a misconception that you need to submit your website
to search engines. Please, please don't pay anyone to do this,
as it's not necessary. (Are you listening all you black hat SEO
companies, shame on you). Once you have created a sitemap in
Google this is more than enough to get yourself listed in the
search engines. The search engines will actually come looking
for your website in due course. Engines like Google and Yahoo
serve listings to lots of other sites. For more information on
this visit http://www.bruceclay.com/searchenginerelationshipchart.htm.
The one place you must submit your website is the Open Directory
or DMOZ for short as this is where all the major search engines
get their directory listings from. For more information on
submitting your website to DMOZ visit http://www.dmoz.com/add.html

Creating a Rough Draft of Your Site
Now its time to start designing your site. Before you go ahead
and start creating a website in Dreamweaver you will need to get
the layout and design in place first. If you want an easier way
to design your site and you are not familiar with Dreamweaver
or technically minded, you can always use website builder
software to create your website. I would recommend this, if you
are just starting out, as this is a quick and simple way to get
your website up and running. For information on using website
building software visit www.umbrellawebsitedesign.co.uk/web_b.html.
However, if you want to get your hands dirty, read on.

The Pen is Mightier Than The Mouse
The first draft of your website should be on paper. Illustrate
where your are going to put everything on your final page,
including images, text and links, and name them for quick
reference. This will save you lots of time later on in
Dreamweaver. You can even sketch out a sitemap of all the pages
in your website showing what page links to what.

Creating a PNG File
Now that you have a rough copy of your layout go ahead and open
fireworks or image ready and start creating your site as a png
file. Here you can start creating your logo and the graphical
elements you plan to use. You can create your navigation and add
your menus and text so that you can easily refer back to them
once in Dreamweaver. Layout everything as it would look like in
a browser. This is a good idea as it's easy to make changes
unlike in Dreamweaver where changes can be time consuming. Go
ahead and save your page as a png file.

Well that's it folks for part one. In part two, I will be
creating a site in Dreamweaver, discussing cascading style
sheets, usability, accessibility and validating your work to
comply with W3G standards.
================================================================
Website design specialist (http://www.umbrellawebsitedesign.co.uk/)
Kevin J. Gallagher works with Umbrella Website Design in the UK.
================================================================

Copyright © 2007 Jayde Online, Inc.  All Rights Reserved.

SiteProNews is a registered service mark of Jayde Online, Inc.