Website Design 2010 Style

It’ s hard to explain to someone who is looking at a website the work that has gone into it to get it to be there. At a glance, if it is a good website, it just looks like a brochure with interactive links. But behind the scenes with good website design it has taken a lot of hard work to get it to look so simple.

The things to aim for with design and code is less is more. The less code you have the faster the website will load and the better the search engine spiders will find the relevant text. When website design first started out everything was laid out in frames and tables. Today, design is very much based around search engines, tables and frames are a big taboo as search engines treat tables as data ignoring the text and frames hide text on different pages away from where you want the viewer to land.

I have found with WISIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) software, like Dreamweaver and such like. The code the software writes is not up to scratch with modern design. They tend to leave a messy code and go about things in a long converluted way, using javascript when it’s not neccarry. Most things can be done with CSS and HTML and it is a very light on code way of doing it. For example take a clickable button. I would use this kind of code...

<a class="button" title="Home" href="http://www.blogger.com/index.html"><span>Home</span></a>

The CSS would do the rest in a very neat and tidy way. Where as a WISIWYG designer would get lumbered with this...

<p><a title="Home" onmouseover="changeImages('home','homein.gif');return true" onmouseout="changeImages('home','home.gif');return true" href="http://www.blogger.com/index.html"><img id="home" src="http://www.blogger.com/home.gif" alt="" name="home" height="25" width="110" border="0" />
You can imagine with a menu that could become very long, which make it slow and difficult for search engines to cypher out the text.

So WISIWYG editors can’t be used, tables can’t be used and frames can’t be used which leaves div’s a invisible box that can be defined by CSS. But don’t just design the whole site replacing tables with div’s as that too can be messy, the trick is to balance each image with the text using as little code as possible, getting a pleasant site for the customer to view and fast, short code for the search engine spider to read. Sounds simple, but thinking of ways to say things in the shortest way possible is not an easy task.

First Post - The post that hurts the most!

Hello,

Welcome to the Pluraweb log or Plog for short.

SEO - Search engine optimisation, is a strange world. People start up companies and charge a fortune as long as they sound like they know what they are talking about. But does anyone actually know? Or are they just guessing? The search engine's have been very clever in keeping these mythical logarithms a secret and only giving a few hints and tips on how it works. Companies dedicated to SEO come along and say "You must make your website w3c compatible! You must have 140 characters in your metatags! You must have a H1, H2, H3, H4, H5!" But are they just making this up?

To be honest I have no idea how search engines work, if I follow some of the rules I get good results and, sometimes, if I don't follow any of the rules I get good results, luckily that's not my department I just design stuff.

I find it frustrating that the internet is an amazing place for new ideas but unless you design your site in a conventional way or write about your idea using the correct amount of certain words then nobody will ever find you. But on the other hand, if you have an opinion about something and get higher than everyone else in search engines, your opinion could soon be everyone elses opinion. Say I have a useless theory about life the universe and everything. If I designed an official looking website and said "this IS the theory to life the universe and everything FACT!" I then got that website to the number one position on all search engines, why would people not believe its true and why is there nobody to stop me doing that? It's more powerful than publishing. But I suppose newspapers spout rubbish everyday, which is the same sort of thing.

However I have the opposite problem with our company's website design, I personally like the look of it, and I think we are a nice company that other people would enjoy working with, or for, though I would say that. http://www.pluraweb.com/ My web site design goes against conventional design and so doesn't do well in search engines, which is annoying, but why should I design it for SEO purposes, surely websites should be designed for the viewer not for a spider.

I'm not sure if it's going against the search engines or working with them but there is a new 'punk' style of website design where the designers are talented but deliberately design sites to shock and get talked about. It is marketing genius! There are loads and loads of discussion threads and blogs about this site http://www.lingscars.com/ which is absolutely brilliant advertising, Lings site and business has won awards. I think Ling is a genius, if not a little mad, if only I had thought to design a site like that, not that it would work for a web design company! But now that it has already has been done it should not be copied, am I saying it's art, I think I am.

I am writing this blog with the intention that nobody will find it or read it, I doubt anyone will, but if you are out there and found this, good day :)