April « 2009 « Texelate’s Blog

Archive for April, 2009

How to make a user-friendly website

Tuesday, April 28th, 2009

From my experience creating a website that is easy to use is not all that difficult yet most people seem to get it wrong. To help you make a more user–friendly website, I here detail what I consider to be the most important elements. Note, there are some exceptions to the rule but this is a pretty good starting point.

1. Use a consistent layout

The main structure of the page—layout, menus, typography—should be the same on every page. Your visitor will know where they are then; it helps them not to get lost in your website.

2. Include a site map

Not only does a site map help your pages get indexed by the search engines more easily, a site map means that the user is never more than two clicks away from any page in your site. A site map, presented in a hierarchical manner, also helps people to visualise how your site is structured and how each page relates to the others.

3. Be approachable

Some sites require a lot of effect to find even a phone number or email address. Being approachable not only means making your postal address, phone and fax numbers and email address available on your website, it also means giving your potential customers the idea that it is a real person or organisation running the website, not some soulless corporation. Photos of yourself and your team work wonders online; and be sure to put lots of calls-to-action (text that incites the user to contact you) in and amongst the text on your website.

4. Put yourself in your visitors’ shoes

Second–guessing your visitors’ requirements in one of the hardest—but most critical—elements to a website. When you explain your requirements to your web designer don’t add functionality for the sake of it and be sure to add the features that benefit your potential customers, not you and your colleagues.

5. Keep it simple

People who surf the Internet are generally lacking in patience and if they can’t find what they want from a site in a short space of time they will go elsewhere. Keep the text on your site concise and if possible re–write it as headlines and bullet points rather than long paragraphs of text.

Conclusion

These five basic principals apply to nearly every website. If you’d like help making a website that your visitors will love using call me on 07843 483 078 or get a free quote online now.

Posted in Business and Money, Usability, Web Design | No Comments »

When is the next PageRank update?

Sunday, April 5th, 2009

Budding search engine optimisers believe that getting a high Google PageRank solves all their organic SEPR problems. Forums, and blogs are rife with the the question, when is the next PageRank update? Although PageRank is something all webmasters should be aware of this article aims to put PageRank and its update into perspective.

PageRank is a numerical value between zero and ten that Google place on each web page. The number equates to how important Google views that particular page, zero being of no importance at all and ten being the highest possible importance. PageRank for any web page can be accessed through various websites and perhaps most commonly through the Google toolbar. PageRank is important but here are some points to bear in mind:

We see different PageRank data to Google

We see an update to Google PageRank approximately every three months. The most common misconception is that Google always sees the same PageRank data that we do –- it doesn’t! Google does this periodic export so we get an idea of how websites are performing; Google is constantly updating its PageRank. Any good blogger will know that if they write a good post you can see it achieve top rankings within 48 hours. If Google waited three months to apply importance on new web pages we would never see fresh content returned in our search results.

Remember it’s PageRank, not SiteRank

Another fallacy is that PageRank is site-wide. For example, if your home page has a PageRank of five then so do all your other pages. It’s incredible how many people are under this illusion considering the names of the technology: PageRank. A lot of webmasters spend time building links to their home page to get a higher PageRank, which is a good idea, but sometimes they tend to neglect other pages (sometime those with their best content on).

Context. Context. Context

Google places huge importance of the context and the relevancy of searches. It’s easy to see the evidence of this; sites with PageRank of nine and ten like BBC, Yahoo and Blogger do not appear in every search we carry out as they would do if Google solely used PageRank as criteria for web page import. So before you start beating yourself up for not having a PageRank of ten look at the keywords on your website. A page with a rank of two will always beat one with a PageRank of ten if it is more relevant.

Quality not quantity

Links from other sites to your web pages are the main contributing factor to PageRank. Each link is like a vote for your web page but not everyone’s vote is the same. The more popular a web page (i.e. higher PageRank) the more importance is placed on your web page. And again context is important, build links that are relevant to your site. Such techniques will update your PageRank much quicker than you think, Google can see the update even though you can’t.

You may read this article and ask, is there any way at all I can check my progress? There is: visit Google Rankings. Here you can enter keywords and a URL, the website then checks with Google and tells you where you appear for a particular search (if at all). This is much more reliable than a PageRank lookup as it looks at where Google places your web page there and then!

Although PageRank is important we shouldn’t agonise over when the next update is. It’s a useful benchmark to see how our site is progressing but we can spend our time doing much more useful things to get our web pages to appear in Google.

For more help call me on 07843 483 078 or get a free quote now!

Posted in Internet Marketing, SEO | No Comments »