A Good Time is Blog Time

Website Design, Languedoc Roussillon France

Websites have been around for a long time and it is likely you have seen every kind of site out there.  From the ones that consist entirely of articles and text, to those that look almost like a picture book.  Either way, we have come a long way from the basic one page layout that started the web design era.  Since we have of plethora of ad-on’s available, do you know where to stop? In other words, do you know how to not make your website annoying to those who visit it?

Here are a few tips that you can follow when designing your website, so you don’t over-do it. Read the rest of this entry »

The description says ‘Website Design Guide’ and ‘Demystified for Beginners’ which does sum up this offering very succinctly. But the content works equally well for blogs, especially the sections on search optimization and using the WordPress platform to create a static style website; if that is what you want. The focus of the book is very much on understanding what makes a good website or blog so that defining the requirements to a professional web designer is made much easier.

That said the second part of the book does go into the technical details of the design approach, not as specific lessons but rather in terms of how you can ensure that updating, maintaining and adding new content is relatively straightforward. There are links out to specific lessons that cover the essential design aspects required for an effective website, of the static variety, for those that do fancy taking the DIY route, but even that information is there primarily to aid understanding. There is also a whole chapter dedicated on deciding whether to take the blogging or static website design route, simply because the sophistication of blogging software allow you to seriously consider that option for either type of design approach.

There are many benefits to having a well designed website, the primary one being that it meets all the requirements of the owner. But also that it functions as required and delivers on the promise you make to potential visitors. There are many aspects to meeting that particular statement, first one being that the website is available at all times, conforms to basic website standards and essentially works on the most basic functional levels. And that is all before you consider the quality of the content and whether visitors value what is provided on the website in terms of products, services or information.

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I was recently asked a question about when is a website ready to publish, I think what was meant by the question, in part was, what is good practice and what is bad practice? So let’s cover what is bad practice first: -

• What you shouldn’t do is have pages published that say things like ‘under construction’ or ‘site being built’ and that have links going to them. That is bad practice and not recommended.
• Second you should make sure all your header information is completed and filled in on a page by page basis i.e. each page has it’s own relevant title, description and keywords. Also you set up your meta tags to convey a message to the search engines on how you want them to treat the page, ‘child friendly’ versus ‘adult’, ‘global indexing’ versus ‘nofollow,noindex’ etc.
• All  pages should have a reasonable amount of relevant content and all links have to work, failure to do this will result in the site being marked down.

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