About Website Design

Websites are an essential and expected communications tool for all types of businesses and organizations. It’s pretty safe to say that almost every organization or business needs a good website. At a minimum prospective clients and vendors will get an idea of what you do by checking out your website. From there, the sky’s the limit. You can offer document sharing, e-commerce, movies, podcasts, polls, memberships, employee productivity tools and on and on.

All of our websites are designed so the client can maintain them on their own if they wish, Commonly called a Content Management System (CMS), a CMS consists of a user side, the part the website’s visitors see, and an administrative side, a password-protected area where the site’s administrators and content contributors make changes. Most of our sites are a hybrid of static and dynamic pages. Static for unique pages that are unlikely to change much, and dynamic using PHP and mySQL for pages that have a lot of similar, repetitive content or that will change regularly.

CMS, PHP and mySQL make things simpler.

Full content management systems (CMS) and custom hybrid sites open a treasure chest of features. Cascading style sheets (CSS), server-side scripting languages like PHP and on-line databases like mySQL offer great control over the look and functionality of the website. For the website visitor these invisible technologies are seen as a more natural, friendly experience. For the website owner they mean easier, faster, more flexible upkeep. We use CSS and PHP for most of our websites and mySQL when there is a lot of similar repetitive information that might change or be added to, such as case studies or product listiings.

WordPress as a CMS. It doesnt have to look like a blog.

Yes, WordPress is a blog, but WordPress can also be a very powerful CMS. WordPress’s rich features and plugins offer many powerful, yet easy ways to design and maintain a site that can have almost any look and feel. This site is powered by WordPress.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Search engine optimization used to be mostly a matter of including title, description and keyword meta tags on each web page. Now SEO is a melange of well-thought-out page and site design, plus external factors. Although it’s  more  than this simple checklist, here are a few key SEO factors that are important to the big three search engines, Google, Yahoo and Bing:

  1. Base your pages on key phrases that people might use to search for your services or products. Try to use key phrases that are popular with searchers but aren’t used that much on websites, higher use and lower competition.
  2. Have content on your site that people will want to read.
  3. Write good, unique title tags specific to each page. Google indexes pages, not websites.
  4. Write a meaningful, one or two sentence meta description. The search engines use this hidden text in their listing of your web page.
  5. Use up-to-date, valid code. The search engines spiders or crawlers that index your pages get thrown off by messy code. It’s not necessary to be perfect; sometimes you have to use non-valid code for an effect or function, but it should clean, organized and as valid as possible.
  6. Register your site with Google. Visit Google’s Webmaster Tools.
  7. Submit a sitemap to Google and put one on your site.
  8. Get as many links from other quality websites to yours as you can. This is huge with Google. Link farms don’t count, and in fact may be considered as negatives. Other websites and directories in your field, Yahoo Directory, on-line press releases and blogs are all good places to start.

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