Are looks everything in Webdesign?
When you flick through websites online, the look of the webdesign is the first thing you notice. A great looking website attracts your initial attention regardless of the content. So yes, the look of a website is very important. But looks alone are not enough to get your website at the top of the search engines with loads of traffic.
A website has function correctly, and be optimised for the search robots as well as look good. The purpose of most websites is to appear in search results, and ideally in the top 10 results of page 1 of Google. Because being in the top 10 of page 1 brings traffic to your business. Anything that might restrict any of these points should be used carefully.
A few basics
Robots hold the key to unlocking the potential of a website. To achieve high ranking, you need the search engine robots on your side. Robots crawl through the text of your website but do not see images, images are more or less useless from the robots view. Text therefore needs to be targeted to the best keywords for your website.
So any web design that is mainly images may well lose out when crawled by the robots compared to a website that has fewer images and more text. This is why flash websites can perform badly in search engine optimisation rankings. They look great but are difficult to crawl. Websites needs to be designed as robot friendly as possible. It needs to be fully compliant with current web standards, none compliance can mean that a robot only crawls part of a web page rather than the whole page and so miss key points on your web page.
A robots ideal web site would be pure text and code. Very boring for humans. So for a website design to function well it needs to satisfy robots need for text and code and humans need for looks and images. So it is the balance of these two factors that is important. And a good web design should give equal effort to both aspects to give you a website that will perform. So the answer to the question is NO looks are not everything in web design.
This article has been updated from the original by Afford Web Design Suffolk featured in Raw Business Magazine.
For more about website design, contact Afford Web Design by email, or phone 01449 736602 / 07825 322693 if you prefer a chat. There is no charge for an initial discussion.
