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Choosing the Right Web Design Company

If you're not careful, choosing a web design company can be a very expensive waste of your valuable time and can even damage your business reputation.

With the recent trend towards design techniques like search engine optimization and internet marketing, a website has a much greater chance of being a successful business tool than it did five years ago. The best design technique is undoubtedly one that strives to make a website search engine friendly. But what does this mean? To choose the right web design company you have to know what this means and learn what to avoid as well as what to look for.

Design Strategies and Techniques

What is a search engine friendly website? In some ways, the best website is a website that is all text. A search engine friendly website is just a website with lots of text that is structured and informative. Search engines love it when a website has a lot of content - but not just any content. Not only must this content be structured in a way that suits the engine's own inner logic, it must be informative. This is your first clue. Virtually every web designer has some idea of what will make a website a successful business website. So, the first thing you should look for is a web designer that has a very clear and set design strategy or technique. But, above all else, try to avoid those that use a strategy or a technique that is not compatible with the search engines.

The second thing to avoid is a design company that tends to concentrate on one design strategy at the expense of all the others. For most designers these issues are instinctual - they do it but they are not consciously aware of doing it.

Most web design companies can be divided into two camps depending on the techniques they use:

1. The Visual and Technical Technique
2. The Textual and Content Technique

The first group tend to use a design techniques that concentrate exclusively on what one might call the visual and technical development of a website while the second group use techniques that concentrate solely on the textual or content development of the website. The latter can be further divided into those that only use the structured strategy and those that use only the informative design strategy. Let's begin with the first design strategy.

The Visual and Technical Technique

The first design strategy will define a good website in terms of what is graphically and technically acceptable. For instance, some people believe that a good website is one that is visually appealing. For others a good website is one that loads quickly or is easy to navigate. When these standards conflict, as they often do, a successful website is one that tries to reach a compromise, i.e., is visually appealing, easy to navigate and fast loading.

Nevertheless, it is the tendency of this technique to add graphical and technical features that not only conflict with the search engines but with the interests of those who are visiting the site. The most famous culprits are things like flash introductions, flashy animations, pop-up windows and the use of frames. There are four good reasons why you should avoid designers who use these techniques: While flashy technical features and beautiful graphics can be appealing, not only are they 1) expensive and 2) time consuming, they 3) drive away customers and 4) hinder attempts to promote the site.

The best design strategy is the one that concentrates on the visual and technical development of a web site, but not at the expense of its search engine friendliness or its textual and content development.

The Textual and Content Technique

Web design companies who use the second design strategy recognize that the question of what makes a good business website is not just a matter of meeting certain technical and visual standards like a pleasing color scheme, loading time or ease of navigation. It is also a matter of doing what it was supposed to do, i.e., improve the bottom line. While there are many cost benefits to having a website, the most obvious way to improve the bottom line is to generate sales leads and this is where most websites fail rather miserably. To generate sales leads, there has to be a constant increase in traffic to the website. To increase the number of visitors to a website, it has to be promoted and appear as high as possible on the search engines for certain keywords.

The second design strategy defines a good website in terms of whether the content of the site is structured in a way that it suits a search engine's inner logic. This strategy concentrates solely on the search engine's ranking algorithm and designs the website so that it can take advantage of this algorithm. This technique is very popular, with the emphasis on keyword analysis, meta tag development and keyword density. The more structured the content is, the more traffic the website will receive. This technique, however, not only continues to ignore the website itself, specifically the informative nature of the website, but the needs of those who visit the website.

The Informative and Structured Strategy

Even with the trend towards search engine optimization, try to avoid design companies who focus exclusively on the structured content of the site They often make the mistake of ignoring the informative content of the site and not thinking about the customer. Even though keyword analysis and meta tag development are important tools, it is the content of the website that has to become a priority. Search engines can see text and only text. They look at meta tags, links, alt tags and the body of the page. Here again, though, it is not just the text or content must be developed, it has to be a particular kind of content, something one might call informative and structured content. Informative and structured content not only helps you make a decision when making a purchase, it has the right keywords arranged in a certain way.

If it is the goal of a business to generate new customers or sales leads using a website, there is another factor that must be considered. While it is true that a lot of people are using websites to purchase products online, even more are using websites to inform themselves about a product or a service. Some of the most helpful sites, for instance, are those that review products or teach you how things work, i.e., Consumer Search and How Stuff Works. While these sites do not sell anything per se, they offer an invaluable service.

Take, for instance, someone who is building his or her first woodworking workshop and wants to begin purchasing some power tools like a drill or a circular saw. If this person is not an expert on these tools he might want to learn something about them so that he can make an informed decision when he makes a purchase. Too many "manufacturing" websites, however, are perfect examples of websites that are not informative. They might have images of their products with detailed and technical descriptions of those products, but no matter how many times you are told that a drill is a 12 volt drill, you are not any more capable of choosing between a 12 volt drill and a 18 volt drill. What you need to know are the benefits or downside of choosing one rather than the other. The manufacturer's website that gives you this information will more likely to get the sale.

Making The Right Choice

When you are ready to choose a web design company make sure that they are prepared to create content that is both informative and structured. Not only should they have web designers and content managers on staff, but they should have search engine optimization specialists. You should also know that the development of a search engine friendly website is basically a two staged process. The structured stage will typically begin with the following: