Choosing Between Web Design and SEO

As you might have already known, having a good web design will certainly attract a lot of traffic into going to your site. Indeed, a flashy animated intro will surely grab a lot of user attention and will entice them to enter your site. And a lot of videos and interactive content will really get them hooked to your site.

However, as it turns out, while these great attention grabbers will get heads turning into your direction, they can also have a large effect on your SEO efforts. And why do I have to be concerned about that, you might probably ask. As you have already known, the search engines have now become to leading tool for many users. Thus, search engine optimization becomes important in order for you to get to the top of the search engine pages and be the first one that users see.

This is where the elements of your site's design also becomes very crucial. One of these is the ever popular flash animation for your site's intro. While this one do get your viewers' attention after only a few seconds, this does have one catch, it can not be detected by the search engine's spiders. And since this one is located right at your homepage, which can be considered as the gateway to your site, it will certainly spell disaster for your site's ranking, since it is the first thing to be crawled by the spiders.

However, there is still a remedy for this one. By surrounding your flash content with descriptive text, you can actually make your flash elements visible to the search engines. This can either be a simple caption or additional instructions, which will also prove useful to your users. Alternatively, you can provide a site map that search engines can explore instead of your flash home page.

But, of course, there is also a flip side to this concern. While being too flashy can damage your search rankings, obsessing with getting page one rank can also ruin your site. Putting in too much keyword rich content will get your web site's look very muddled. Also, too much optimization can affect the usability of your site for visitor.

The best remedy for this quagmire is, of course, striking a balance between your site's web design and its search engine visibility. Decide and which parts of your site will require more optimization and which ones can be used for flash animation. Also, organize your site's design, such that these two elements integrate into each other. This might take a lot of work, but it will produce a very good site.

To Get Or Not To Get A Template

As many of those in the online business world have already known, website design is perhaps the hardest part of the field. You have to work on a lot of mind numbing code just to change a few images. Thus, many site owners are now turning to templates for their site designs.

However, there are still purists who insist that it is better to work on a site design yourself. They say that this will make your design more flexible and you have a lot more options than what templates can offer. So why would you go for templates then?

One of the biggest draws of website templates is that it is easier to work on. All you have to do is download your desired template and put in your content and you automatically get a complete website. This one will surely save you a lot of time in having to do everything yourself. Also, this means that you don't even need to get yourself a designer.

Also, the template is rather very cost effective. Most are being sold for only around a few dollars each and some are in fact given for free. This one is definitely very affordable as compared to the thousands of dollars that you need to shell out to get a web designer. And here's another interesting bit. Since most of the templates are actually made by some of the top web designers today, you will actually get the sane results without having to pay them big time.

But of course, though they are indeed very useful, web templates aren't really that perfect. For one, since many of the popular web templates out there are, well, very popular, a lot of people are actually using them. This means that if you go for them also, you will end up looking just the same as tons of other sites. And as we all know, being unique is very crucial if you want to catch attention in the net.

Also, a big downside of many web templates is that they offer only a small amount of customization options. Thus, even if you want your site to look one of a kind, you will still be stuck with what you have. This one will definitely not be a good idea.

This is the part where having a web designer right beside, or at least know how to design yourself, will come in handy. With those, you will still be able to tweak your template in order to make the most out of it. Also, you will have more flexibility in creating your templates.

As, you can see, the question of whether to get a template or a designer is unlikely to be settled anytime soon. In fact, each site administrator will have his own preferences. But if you only know how, you can actually make the most out of both worlds.

Improving Your Site's Navigation

One of the most important aspects of web design that site managers need to most concern about is its usability. After all, even with a flashy layout and all the other stuff, a site still won't catch on to users if they keep scratching their heads on how to go along the pages. Thus, in order to retain your visitors, you need to make sure that your site is fool proof when it comes to usability.

Navigation is perhaps the foremost issue that designers need to contend with when developing a site's user interface. It is not uncommon for users to leave a site simply because they can't go anywhere from the home page. Thus, in order for your users to easily make their way around your site, you need have an easy to use navigation bar placed in a convenient location.

For this one, it would be a good idea to place your navigation bar either on the top or at the left of your pages, since these are the first ones that your visitors will look into. Make sure that they are large enough (not too large though) and visible to your users. Also it would be a good idea to put in a smaller and simpler looking navigation bar at the bottom of your pages for extra measure.

Still on the topic of navigation bars, you probably have noticed those bars with animations appearing on them whenever the mouse moves over them. These has become very popular with many sites nowadays. However, though they really look good, they do have one downside. Since most of these menus are made with external scripts, like Flash, those browsers which don't have support for these would not be able to display them. To save your visitors the hassle of having to install additional scripts, it would be better if you stick to the tried and tested way of simply using hyperlinked texts for your navigation bar.

Aside from the main navigation bar, you can further improve your site's navigation by putting in additional navigation buttons. Two of the most important buttons that you need to have are the home and back buttons. Place these in a convenient location, so as not to have your users fumble for the browser control panel for the same functions.

Telling your visitors where they are in your site is also important for user navigation. Thus, it would be a good idea to put in these headers on top of the pages themselves. You don't really need to be elaborate on this one, as simple text will do. What you need to indicate here tough are the specific folders and subfolders where the particular page belongs.

Lastly, don't forget the site map. Many site developers actually do forget this one, probably because of the hard work that needs to be done to make it. However, this, of course, is a bad idea. The site map is very useful for your visitors in case all of your site navigation systems fail. Thus, you should have this ready at all times.