One of the primary implications of a well-organized / good website, is to keep your visitors in the website. A website is definitely created for a purpose, unless intended for personal use, which is the minority. For example, a portfolio website would want to be visited and it’s content viewed. For companies and internet businesses, your website certainly aims to provide product information, to make sales, or somewhat similar. However, most individuals undoubtly prefer visually captivating designs, so on and so forth. It is undeniable that this causes no harm, but one must put himself/herself in other people’s shoes, as to understand how a visitor to the website might think, do and react.
1) Navigation
As I said, a web designer has to learn how to think the way your visitors think.
Situation A : Website with good navigation ( 2-3 hyperlinks to target page ), well planned in terms of placement, and design.
Situation B : Website with poor navigation ( takes forever for the visitor to reach his/her target page ), hard-to-read navigation fonts and poor placement of the navigation buttons/bar.
In Situation A, a visitor will always want to be able to access his/her target page. For example, the individual comes across your website, and is interested in the product sold, but wants to find more information. He/she finds the navigation with no trouble, and enters the particular product information page.
As for Situation B, a visitor stumbles into the website, and would also like to find out more information about the product. Unfortunately, due to bad placement and fanciful font-types, the visitor takes forever, or even fails to find the navigation bar. Even when he/she does so, links to the product information are nowhere to be found, (example : home > about > products > product image > etc…[a few more clicks] > product information ).
Analysis : In both situations, wouldn’t a website with characteristics similar to the Situation A be more rewarding ergo better?
25.Mar.08 
Internet Marketing Strategies 
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Now, some of you may ask why would you take the time to make your site more accesible to all user? Actually, by doing so not only you are doing a good favor for the visually impaired community, it will also make your site easily crawled by bots.
And what can you do to make your sites more accessible?
Google webmasters has been developing a special search tool called Google Accessible Search located in http://labs.google.com/accessible/
This search, tends to favor pages that degrade gracefully: pages with few visual distractions and that are likely to render well with images turned off. Flashing banners and dancing animals are probably the worst thing you could put on your site if you want its content to be read by an adaptive technology like a screen reader.
Here are some basic tips from Google Webmasters:
- Keep web pages easy to read, avoiding visual clutter and ensuring that the primary purpose of the web page is immediately accessible with full keyboard navigation.
- There are many organizations and online resources that offer website owners and authors guidance on how to make websites and pages more accessible for the blind and visually impaired. The W3C publishes numerous guidelines including Web Content Access Guidelines that are helpful for website owners and authors.
- As with regular search, the best thing you can do with respect to making your site rank highly is to create unique, compelling content. In fact, you can think of the Google crawler as the world’s most influential blind user. The content that matters most to the Googlebot is the content that matters most to the blind user: good, quality text.
- It’s also worth reviewing your content to see how accessible it is for other end users. For example, try browsing your site on a monochrome display or try using your site without a mouse. You may also consider your site’s usability through a mobile device like a Blackberry or iPhone.
17.Mar.08 Internet Marketing Strategies Comments (0)
This is one hot debate about SEO is on sites which are using Flash. As many of you already know, Flash is good visual appealing medium, while the Googlebot
doesn’t have eyes. When googlebot crawls a site containing flash medias, this is what they get,
- Googlebot can typically read Flash files
- Extract the text and links in them,
However, the structure and context are missing which is actually bad for SEO. You see, Googlebot doesn’t currently have the algorithmic eyes needed to read these
graphics, these important keywords can be missed entirely. So the question is "what’s an honest web designer to do?". Here’s the list to start with :-
- Try to use Flash only where it is needed. Many rich media sites such as Google’s YouTube use Flash for rich media but rely on HTML for content and navigation. You can too, by limiting Flash to on-page accents and rich media, not content and navigation.
- sIFR: Some websites use Flash to force the browser to display headers, pull quotes, or other textual elements in a font that the user may not have installed on their computer. A technique like sIFR still lets non-Flash readers read a page, since the content/navigation is actually in the HTML — it’s just displayed by an embedded Flash object.
- Non-Flash Versions: A common way that we see Flash used is as a front page "splash screen" where the root URL of a website has a Flash intro that links to HTML content deeper into the site. In this case, make sure there is a regular HTML link on that front page to a non-Flash page where a user can navigate throughout your site without the need for Flash.
05.Mar.08 Internet Marketing Strategies Comment (1)
