Web Design & SEO Blog, Inverness Blogs

Is your website simply and logical structured? If not, then your visitors may have problems finding what they’re looking for?

And if visitors can’t find what they’re looking for then there’s a good chance the search engines won’t navigate your site properly either. And that’s not good news for your site’s visibility.

How User-friendly Is Your Site?
Sometimes people seem too intent on getting search engine rankings that they forget the whole point of their website’s existence – whether it’s to make money in a business, to promote a cause or anything else that they planned to use the website for in the first place. And if you forget the human users of your website then you may generate visitors but you will not gain the attention or the sales you desired.

So, before you consider search engines, have a think about the following:-

• Are all areas of the website easily accessible without too many clicks?
• How am I inviting the visitor to spend more time on my site and therefore increase the likelihood of them making an enquiry or placing an order?
• Can my users ‘get lost’ down a long stream of links without being able to find a way back?

I hate to say it, but in a world where people’s time is not cheaply held onto, you need to make things as effortless as possible and do whatever is reasonably necessary to hold their attention. Your visitor is the centre of attention, not you.

So here’s a few simple pointers:-

• Put links to the main areas of your website on all pages of your website, making sure visitors don’t get lost.
• Invite them in to the experience of your site, your cause or your business. Give them reason enough to be curious to load one or two more pages. A click-back from your homepage with no return is reason to rethink.
• Put the focus on your visitor – don’t talk about how great your company or cause is in the first paragraph. Consider what people actually came to find and give it to them

My final suggestion for this post is that testing your site on friends and family (i.e. other real people who are not you) is a good way to see how users interact with your website – get feedback, take it positively and give your visitors a happy experience on your website.

Now you’ve made it easier for your human visitors, you’ve almost certainly made it easier for search engines, but we will deal with that more in the next post. Happy website building!

I wonder sometimes if the trends and activities that people exhibit on-line would translate into acceptable behaviours in the ‘real world’. Let’s just think of a few, shall we?

a. Would you go up to a shop window on the High Street and post your own business’ fliers on their windows without permission, or worse still graffiti their windows to get your name heard and ‘out there’?
b. Would you then try to persistently sell the same shop completely unrelated products to the lines they are displaying in the window?
c. Would you do any of the above without the permission of the store manager or possibly even an Area Manager or the CEO?

I truly suspect not. There are perfectly valid ways of getting your name ‘out there’ that don’t intrude on other people trying to do the same thing.

Why then do we have such activities as:-

a. Persistent junk mail (which untargeted, unsolicited mail is rightly described as) trying to sell us products I do not need, want nor have the time or money to purchase?
b. Persistent attempts to post on this blog or other websites adverts and links to completely unrelated products to those that our legitimate business is offering?
c. Attempting to do the above without asking our business whether this is okay?

People’s and business’ websites are not the public domain and whoever’s site you are posting on they have the absolute legitimate right to refuse to publish your adverts. The same goes here at mOxby Design.

If you want to post junk on ANYONE’s website, because I’m not just defending my own corner here, consider this:-

You come home from work one day to find you can’t open your door due to posters advocating the destruction of rainforests for the furtherance of the urbanisation of planet Earth. You work for Greenpeace and those posters have been seen by countless members of the public who are now shocked at your sudden change of stance. You haven’t had a chance to defend yourself but people are now puzzled because there is an inconsistency of message.

That’s why webmasters around the globe have the right to refuse to publish any non-related or too obviously self-proclaiming ‘reply’ to your topic. If your message doesn’t fit with where you are posting it, then don’t post it.

You wouldn’t do it in the ‘real world’, so why do it on our shop front? Ours happens to be a website rather than on the high street, but that shouldn’t change the respect we should all be showing each other, should it?

This week I successfully completed the fairly standard but neat-looking website for my wife’s business soXby Creations.

As a web designer, I don’t just interest myself in pretty pictures (although I do like pretty pictures), but also in the HTML, the CSS, PHP and JavaScript of it all. Design (Appearance) and Coding (Part appearance, part functionality).

Our coding is governed by coding standards – this is supposed to ensure that whatever platform (Windows, Mac OSX, Linux etc) and whichever browser (Firefox, Opera, Safari, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome etc) websites are viewed in that they actually appear consistent, the aim being that the browser provides other functionality, plug-ins, personalisation, whatever tickles your fancy. A website is a website is a website – i.e. you get one built and your audience from around the globe get the same service. Right? Well… almost. Possibly.

I have long used Mozilla Firefox for my websites. Okay it uses up a few more system resources, but I have a good laptop in front of me so I’m not that fussed. It’s Open Source, which I also support. But I accept the fact that not everyone has my taste in browser. Fair enough.

So any site I build I test in about 5 mainstream browsers. Firefox was fine, as was Safari and Google Chrome. Opera seems to want to render the colours differently to the others, but that’s out of my control and I can live with that (sort of). Then a friend messages me on Facebook just to show me a screenshot of this lovely site in Internet Explorer 7. Layers were all messed up and nothing was in its rightful place.

Internet Explorer 7 was the 7th browser created by those on high in Microsoft which ignores coding standards. For so long I had to code for IE7 and below until they finally released Internet Explorer 8 and it was a big selling point that they were now W3C standards compliant.

Now do excuse me for sitting on my high horse, but surely standards should be, well, standard? Thankfully, when logging onto my Windows partition on my laptop, the site looked fine in Internet Explorer 8. Out of the 26 unique visitors to mOxby Design in the last month, only 3 used IE7, the rest were on IE8. Thank Goodness.

So Microsoft finally acknowledged what we knew all along with the release of IE8 and that’s the fact that we must acknowledge cross-platform standards. IE8′s been around for a while now but guess what? Simple things like a picture preview pane that sits in the top middle and moves with the scrollbar? Worked fine with all browsers except IE8, because Internet Explorer doesn’t give items on the page the same references (aka the ‘DOM’ or Document Object Model) so I had to add extra lines of JavaScript to the site.

When will the guys at MS finally cotton on and stop making us website developers do their own coding for them?