What to do and what not to do for great website designing

Re: What to do and what not to do for great website designing

Do some research into the type of site you want to development. See what others have done in the same field and work on putting your ideas to the site. Every site is different and can be great. It just depends on the time and effort you put into it.

Re: What to do and what not to do for great website designing

If you're interested in creating a site that simply looks good and you're not concerned about the amount of website traffic you're likely to attract, there are really no limitations - let your imagination run wild. If however you're like most people and want your website to be discovered by Google and to rank well, there are some pitfalls you need to avoid. A couple to tips to help you along the way:

Don't design everything on your site in Flash - Flash content is invisible to search engine robots (this may change in weeks, months or years, but for now, it's still problematic).

The same applies to overusing images in menus and in place of readable content (because search engines can only read text - not images). Hiding important keyword-rich content in such ways will guarantee you're site never ranks well for your important products or services and associated keywords.

I guess the secret to a great looking website - that works from a business perspective - is to get the balance right between form (design) and function (it needs to be search engine friendly). So, my tip would be to go with a decent ready made and free platform such as WordPress or Joomla and spend some time finding a good looking theme (either free or modestly priced - there are hindreds of thousands available online) for which you can then modify the design to reflect your business' identity. The beauty of a Wordpress website is that search engines love them. So you're off to a good start.

I use a $35 WordPress theme on my own website and it cost me a measly $35 USD. I think I did pretty well. You can check it out and read a relevant post here: 'website design costs'. Hope this info helps.
Cheers
Steve

Re: What to do and what not to do for great website designing

Other than the design and site structure. Your website must be optimized for on-page and off-page. By this mean, you will need to use different on-page factors such as SEO-friendly URLs, Meta Tags, Header Tags, Alt tags for images, link diversity like site navigation and footer links, etc.