The Benefits of a Professionally Designed Website

My cousin/nephew/brother/neighbour’s dog is a web designer – why do I need you?

Although it plays a big part, effective web design isn’t just about the aesthetics – it’s also about the code behind the website. Your website may look professional, but how does it perform within search engine results?

Whereas well written, standards-compliant code will boost your search engine rankings, badly written code can have the opposite effect, causing information to be technically unavailable to search engines, despite being visible to most of your visitors.

Additionally, your code may have left serious security loop holes, or cause your website to display incorrectly in some web browsers. Remember, not everyone uses Internet Explorer and not everyone uses a PC!

Although there are many people that dabble in it, we recommend that you consider the following issues before entrusting your professional image to someone who isn’t well-versed in creating and delivering professional, high-quality web solutions.

• Is the person you are going to hire knowledgeable about search engine optimisation or other methods of driving traffic to your site?
• Do they understand browser compatibility issues and how the site will appear to various visitors?
• Can they advise on hosting services, registering or transferring a domain name, legal issues and accessibility?
• Can they balance usability with an efficient, aesthetically pleasing design?
• Obtain, create and manipulate high-quality graphics and images?
• Create a site that is easily updatable by you?
• Understand new access technologies such as mobile phones, PDAs and RSS?
• Create a website that communicates your branding and sets you apart from your competition?

What is RSS?

RSS, or ‘Really Simple Syndication’, is a way of broadcasting/syndicating your website content to all interested parties. In other words, a way to notify people that there is new information on a website. It is a rapidly growing technology which hundreds of thousands of weblogs, news-related sites and other online publishers use every day to keep their readers connected.

By signing up for web content that has been syndicated by using RSS, people can browse through a list of new content. Typically, they can click on a URL (included with most entries) to go to a corresponding page on the website for details. For example, a news site might use RSS to syndicate headlines. Users who subscribe to the service on that news site receive an email message regularly with the latest headlines.

Read more