Website Appearance, Usability and Search Engine Visibility

One my visitors recently inquired if it was possible for me to take a look at their companies website. I will not be publishing the URL or name of the company, partially because by the time you read this the site will have been modified anyway, and also to protect the identity of the parties involved. Anyway let’s get on to the meat and potatoes of this post, shall we?

Alright let me start by explaining how the site was laid out frist; it made heavy use of graphics and had images adorning most parts of the page, they used this to provide curved borders, different background images for different sections of the page, and so on. It had a top navigation bar, that was entirely driven using JavaScript, and it mimicked the type of menu bar you would find in computer programs (there is a horizontal menu bar with different items listed). As you place your cursor over one of  those items, the menu will automatically expand vertically. As you move the mouse cursor down the pop-up menu, the item beneath the pointer is highlighted. Of course if you were to click on one of those it would take you to the intended page.

Generally speaking this is the type of thing you would expect to see from someone who is new to we design. As it seems to be a thing of real beauty and of course gadgetry, however it starts going downhill rather quickly as it only works well in one browser and the search engine spiders have a hard time making their way trough it. The main reason behind the visitor writing to me was because the website suffered a significant drop in the number of visitors after it was redesigned into this current state.

In this post I use this site as a good starting point for discussing some of the issues that a web designer should consider when creating a website that will become a great resource for many visitors on the web to use, as opposed to a site that is may just be created to fulfill the course requirements of a school or university.

Appearance is NOT the Most Important Issue

Over the years that I have been in web design, I have found that many newcomers tend to focus excessively on the appearance of a website, I started out this way as well. The site that I mentioned earlier is my case in point (for this post): the designer tried very hard to make the site look beautiful and while they may have succeeded on that front there is much more to consider here. It may be hard to wrap your mind around it right now but appearance isn’t the most important thing to look at when you are planning and buidling your site.

Don’t get me wrong, site appearance is very important in its own right, but my intention for this post is to address the amount of importance newcomers place on beauty. However you will not want to go to the other extreme and place no importance on the appearance of your website.

After putting that out there, I would like to mention that even if your site is plain-looking you can still make it on the internet, just have a look at Google for example. Keep in mind that you will still have to consider all the other important issues in web design.

Usability is Important

Every website was created for a particular purpose whether it was created to sell something, be an information resource, or to showcase your talents (a personal branding site).

Usability is one of the most important aspects to consider on your website. When creating your website you should always ask yourself this basic question: can your visitors easily access the information they want, so that they will do what you want them to do? While this question covers a lot, it‘s very important that you take the time to consider it and make sure that your website is doing what you need it to do.

Information Availability

Make sure that your site includes information that enables your visitors to make informed decisions. An example of this would be; usually customers want to know about a product before buying the product. Therefore you will want to provide your visitors as much information as you possibly can, it’s important to note that you may be able to just place a one line description on the front page of your website (this depends on what type of site you are running though).

Information Accessibility

Once you have some great information for your visitors, you‘ll want to make sure that it‘s easily accessible for them. By providing a detailed description of a product on page that is difficult for your visitors to find will not help you increase any sales, or click troughs (what ever you are going for).  In fact, if your visitors find that they have to work to find anything of value on your website they will not be staying very long at all. It’s important to get your visitors where they want to go within a couple clicks of the mouse.

Navigation

This is a crucial thing to include on your website. Of course the navigational system is what helps your visitors move from one page to another, and find the sections of your site which they would like to visit. On this site, I make it easy for you to find your way to the homepage, and some of the other more important pages on this site.

Good navigational system features:

1. If your site will be using a navigation bar or panel, you should standardize its location on all of your pages. This will help your visitors to easily navigate your site, and they will know right where to look when they want to get somewhere on your site.
2. On your navigation bar or panel, you should provide links to the places on your site that visitors would most likely want to visit. You won’t want to force your visitors to have to navigate through the main page every time they want to visit another page on your site. In fact, put direct links in logical places some examples, on your “Products” page, you should have a links to your “Buy / Order” page as well as links to the detailed information pages about the individual products. It‘s important to put yourself in the visitors position, and think about how you like to navigate your way through a site.
3. It’s important that all visitors will be able to use your navigation system. This means you will want to avoid using things that are dependent on certain facilities or features being available. For example you probably won’t want to make your navigation system, JavaScript based, as not all browsers have the ability to read it, and also some users may not have it turned on.
4. If you are running a larger site it may not be a bad idea to include a search engine to help visitors easily find certain page they may be looking for. Not everyone thinks in the same way, so something that may make sense to you will make no sense to someone else. Thus by giving your visitors a way to search your web site will help them locate what the information they want.
5. It’s always good to have a Site Map, unless you have a small site with only a few pages on it. This will allow people to have another way to navigate and find their way around your website. It will also help search engines find every page that is on your website.

Search Engine Visibility is Your Site’s Lifeline

Remember that I mentioned earlier that after completing the site redesign, that companies search engine rankings dropped? As you may have already noticed I mentioned a couple of time about what makes it hard for a search engine spider to navigate your pages, and even a mention of what you can do to help them find every page of your web site. Let’s go ahead and dive a little deeper into this topic.

As you may have already concluded the major problem is that the navigation was totally based on JavaScript, which makes it hard for spiders to find their way around your website. Aside from having an all JavaScript menu there were no other links available that connected the web pages together, thus the spiders could only find the main page of the site and that’s all that got indexed. Since only the main page was being indexed now, potential visitors would not be able to find the website through the search engines anymore, since most of the sites pages were no longer indexed, leading to a drastic drop in visitors and revenue.

This is a problem that has a fairly easy remedy. The easy way to fix this would be to build a sitemap and include a link to it from the main page of the site. Or you could optionally redesign the main menu so everyone can more easily navigate your website, remember that some users will not be able to use a JavaScript based menu either.

As you may have already noticed (if you made it this far), web design is a fairly lengthy topic, and this post didn’t even make a dent into it. However if you would like to know more about this topic either let me know, so I can continue writing posts like this, or just keep following along as I’m sure that I will be writing more on this topic.