web design, graphic design, art, music and illustration

When you are planning to launch an online presence, it’s important to develop your website’s content before a designer begins building the site. How the site looks is important, but not remotely close to the message that it delivers. This article will help you create that message.

1) Why are you making a website?

Your website should have a goal (other than providing information). What is your goal?

• Checkout process: Products are sold online in a shopping cart environment
• Contact form: The first step in ordering a product or service
• Contribute: Your site may rely on visitor interaction (like a dating site, social network, forum or directory). Getting the visitor to sign up and add information would be your goal in this case.

2) Who will be using this site?

Make a list of the types of visitors that may visit your site.  Include traits like:

• Experience: Will your site cater to first-time users or will your content address well informed customers?
• Location: It may be important to qualify a customer?
• Age
• Sex
• Income: Make sure your image is aligned with your customers’ wallet.  Sounding too expensive will discourage low income visitors.  Wealthy visitors may lose interest if your product/service looks too “middle class.”

Question: Will each group of visitor require a different goal? If so, you’re site may require repeated content on some pages.

Circle the type of visitors that are more likely to navigate to your goal?

This may be a good time to disregard certain types of visitors and develop content to those who are more likely to navigate to your goal.

3) CONTENT!

Your navigation will be based on standard pages, information pages and your goal page(s).

HOMEPAGE

The “Elevator speech” or mission statement: If you just met a nice person in an elevator, how would you explain what you do in a minute or two? I have this elevator speech on my website:

I am a Eugene, Oregon Graphic Designer with experience in designing, coding and hosting professional web sites. For over 5 years, terrytoledo.com has been a creative graphic design company serving:

* Small businesses needing brand development and advertising
* Established organizations needing printed materials and a web launch
* National companies in search of experienced professionals

My clients are as diverse as the design solutions they require. I offer professional, fast and inexpensive solutions in the communications industry. I have 10 years experience creating great designs. I have a casual demeanor, but I am serious about representing my clients.

Call me for a free estimate on any project (illustration, graphic art or web design).

Your intro can include:

• duration of experience
• types of services/products
• call to action

The homepage may also include

• new services/products
• multimedia (flash or video)
• a list of your webpage highlights. Each bullet explains the content on that particular page and includes a link to that page

CONTACT US

• Mailing address
• Fax
• Phone
• Social network links
• Email address
• Contact form

ABOUT US

• Your passion for ______
• Short and long-term goals
• Number of employees
• Experience & education
• Awards, Permits and licenses

TESTIMONIALS

The most influential marketing tool, ever.

PRODUCTS/SERVICES

Organize them by:

• New products/services
• Best Sellers
• Popular (featured on other websites, TV, radio or other media)
• Sales and specials
• Manufacturer
• Use

Identify your product/service

• Quality
• Durability
• Reliability
• Convenience
• Safety
• Comfort
• Status
• Style/Image
• Luxury
• Time-saving
• Workmanship
• Economy/Savings

REMEMBER! All content must talk to the group of visitors that you circled in section 2!

Include links to these pages from each product page

• Warranties
• Shipping Terms/Time frames
• Returns
• Customer Service

ASSOCIATED INFORMATION

Each page that falls within this section will cover general information about your industry.

• History of the industry (Wikipedia is a great inspiration)
• Trade Shows
• Manufacturing process
• General uses of your types of product/service

LINKS

• Social Network
• Contractors
• Manufacturers
• Business partners

4) Fill in the holes and take a good look at your competition!

Compare your content to your competition, focus on these topics:

• Price
• Service
• Location
• Quality
• Information

What topics are your strengths?

What are your weaknesses?

Have you promoted your strengths on your homepage?  Your product pages? Make sure your strengths are front and center! Does your competition cover information you do not? Include this content if it is relative to your product or service. Make sure it is located in your navigation so that the viewer is encouraged to click on your goal page!

5) Reorganize your content to influence your search engine rankings!

I’ve written about search engine optimization.

• Google Page Rank (Part 1)
• Google Page Rank (Part 2)

I’ve attended conventions like the Portland Code Camp at Reed College.  One of the classes that I felt most involved with was the Search Engine Optimization and Internet Marketing lecture.  The class was taught by Colleen Wright and assisted by Jennifer Goudey-Forster. Although much of the class covered information I have already written about, I was introduced to additional ideas worth mentioning.  I’ve also learned a great deal about Social Networking and SEO from the small business class at Mercy Corps NW.  The Foundations Class was taught by Bill Horton and featured a lecture by Benjamin Tomkins.  I also follow a number of bloggers on SEO topics, check back as I plan on organizing a nifty “Links Page” soon!

There are two methods of optimizing a web site for search engines:  On-Page and Off-Page

On-Page Factors

Creating HTML documents that are formatted to give important information to search engines is essential to reaching your target market.  Some of these factors are:

• Title Tag
• Page Name (H1, H2 and H3 Tags)
• Bolded Text
• Anchor Text (the text that becomes hyperlinked)
• The text displayed at the top of the content
• Image Tag and Name
• Meta Tag (Search engines still use this info.  Meta tags give information on what your page is about, but this info does not get displayed unless it appears in some kind of search result.
• URL (although it may not actually be in the HTML document, but the url contains the domain name and the document’s name.  Both names will benefit the site if they are part of the site’s keywords.
• 5% to 7% keyword density

A note on density:  Although it is important to have your keywords appear on your site often, how those terms are placed is equally important to search engine optimization.

Keyword Strategies other than density

• The relative distance between keywords – Search engines will note when keywords are often used together in a sentence.
• Where the keywords appear on the HTML document – When a web page is built correctly, the most important terms relating to the document should appear near the beginning (the title or heading on top).  After the main content is placed after the header, less important terms (links, images, forms) should be arranged in order of their importance.  The least pertinent terms should be saved for the bottom of the HTML document.  When using columns and tables, it’s important to remember that search engines count the terms in a linear way.

• The frequency of the keywords – Search engines use linguistic formulas to determine if keywords are being used properly.  Nouns and verbs are recorded in relation to sentence building, keywords that are used frequently in proper context will receive a higher rank.
• How keywords relate to the main topic (and the sub topics derived from it) – Keywords planted on the page will be meaningless to the search engine if they are unrelated to the document’s content.

It may be common sense, but some SEO services still duplicate keywords into HTML documents without regards to sentence structure.  Although I may not always use the best grammar, the fact that my keywords are presented within readable content will give them credibility.

More On-Page Factors that assist in Page Rank

The On-Page methods involve the HTML coding and copy writing processes. I use a number of methods in my coding when optimizing web pages for search engines. Here a are some HTML and CSS tips:

• I use the “display: none;” type style very cautiously. Search engines are sensitive to key word stuffing, so this HTML practice is only used for short headlines, company names or slogans.
• I keep all important information near the top of the HTML document because search engines give higher rank to leading content.
• I use sub navigation lists that repeat key words while allowing users to access parts of the site with fewer clicks.
• A legitimate way to add links to a content management web site is by listing search results within your site. For example, after a search has returned a list of links in your site, a sub navigation can offer suggestions to the current search results. This sub navigation will list a number of similar keywords found on the site. An extra benefit to having search results listed as urls are the extra HTML pages that will be created on the server side. The web crawlers will call up the urls and force content to be pulled from the cms database. These large additional html pages will be created by the cms when normally they are only created by a web browser whose search triggers the cms to que the database.
• I make sure that my code is validated with the Web Consortium. This will assure correct emphasis on HTML tags and page content. Also, since I state W3C validation in my contract, my clients and I have a non-biased service that determines when our project is finished. I usually charge extra for cross browser errors (Internet Explorer consistently breaks web sites when interpreting HTML code and WordPress sometimes places paragraph tags in random places, conflicting with a validation). The W3C service is priceless.

I’ve been writing HTML code by hand since 1996, I’ve learned a great deal in the past 14 years!

Off-Page Factors

(submitting data and links to other sites)

Web sites that connect to your site with hyperlinks are often called backlinks. There are a number of ways to develop free backlinks to your site:

• Directories
• Internet Press Releases
• Social Networking Sites

Search engines rank backlinks by a number of criteria:

• Authority Sites (major publications, blogs or forums) that have a large following will benefit your page rank by hosting a link to your site
• Sites with a PageRank of 5 or more will increase the value of your site
• .edu and .gov sites are considered excellent references
• The age of your backlinks also plays a factor in adding value to your site
• If the site linking to yours has similar content, search engines will put more emphasis on the backlink

There are a number of ways to find backlinks for your site, one way is by contacting me!  I can provide a free estimate on optimizing your site with on-page and off-page methods.  Of course, SEO will not guarantee you a great PageRank, but with proper planning and strategically placing your url linked on other sites, your website will be in a better position to grow in popularity.

Hits coming from search engines are called organic visits. If you’re a business, however, you might as well call them new customers. Most businesses invest in a website to expand their customer base, unfortunately, without proper attention to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) a nice website can sit unnoticed.

Each click that leads to your website is a vote. These votes are weighed with additional factors that ultimately determine a page rank by a search engine. The process of ranking every website is so elaborate, an independent industry has developed to provide search engine optimization. Companies can now guarantee page rank results by adjusting html files and adding specific content. Optimizing a website can run up to $3,000 and can turn a business into a multi-national company within a year. For the best explanations, visit Wikipedia’s search engine optimization and PageRank definitions.
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Take a look at my paintings, too! I now have a way to sell my artwork over the web. So far, everything in my store comes with free shipping. Check back often as I offer digital prints of past work, cafepress tees, stickers and my first comic book.

I plan on sending these postcards out very soon. Let me know if you would like a copy by sending me your address with the contact page!

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