Web Design

The term web design encompasses a range of tasks. The colour scheme, images and layout are just a small part of the design process. Other aspects to consider in the design are navigation, flow of information and the actual coding of the site.

Navigation -

How visitors to your site  move from page to page is known as navigation. Navigation is crucial in allowing your customers to find the information they require but also how you can guide your visitors to the page you want them on. A website is not a book. Its pages are not viewed in a logical order. Visitors are keen to find the information they are looking for as quickly as possible. As the visitors to your site will generally be looking for different information the navigation helps them find the right page. Obviously, this means your navigation should be well thought out and intuitive. It should also be in a clear place and consistent from page to page.

Coding – The nuts and bolts

All sites built by Blend use XHTML and CSS. In days of old, the layout of a website was achieved using tables, inside of tables, inside of tables. Modern practices remove the need for tables and use a separate document (Cascading style sheet) to dictate how the elements of the page are displayed. The benefits to this approach are that the actual content of a page is kept separate from its design which helps search engines and screen readers 'read' and display the page as it should be viewed.

Accessibility

Today's websites must be viewable across many different platforms. The current crop of mobile phones all have the ability to view pages on the world wide web and how the information on a web page is displayed on a small mobile device is dependant on how the site is built. More importantly it is the law that websites are accessible. This means your site should use semantic mark up where content (XHTML) is separated from design (CSS) so that the site can be viewed by screen readers. By controlling the styling of your site through CSS it is possible for visitors to your site to resize the text using their browser's settings.

SEO – getting to the top

So you've got a great new website that looks the bee's knees. But hey, no one's looking. All you need now are visitors. For most, an obvious way to get your site noticed is through a listing on popular search engines.

Getting to the top of Google can be easy or difficult depending on what your potential visitors type into the search engines. Knowing the search terms or keyword phrases that will be used in finding your site are vital.

As part of the design process, Blend will submit your site to the major search engines including Google, Yahoo and MSN and build the site in way that makes it easy for the search engines to know what your site is about. An early stage in the design process is knowing the search terms. Other simple yet important steps include

• Page titles – The page title plays an important part in informing the search engines what the page is about. A page title of 'Welcome' is ambiguous and a wasted opportunity to say what the page is about. For example, this particular page has a title of 'Liverpool Web Design, accessibility and search engine optimisation'
• Heading tags – Just as with the page titles, search engines look at the content of a page for clues about its content. By using HTML heading tags in the coding of a page the search engines can distinguish between basic text and heading text.
• Text links – Although using images for the navigation elements can make your site look really pretty, from an optimisation perspective text links tell the search engines a little about the target page. Using text links doesn't mean your navigation menu will look boring as creative use of cascading styles can bring them to life.
• Alt tags – Alt tags are used to as a textual description of an image on a page. Primarily used to aid blind users the alt tags can also be used by search engines that can't 'read' images.