Zwartberg R&D website design

Designing a website is not just a matter of making a web page and hosting it somewhere.

Common errors with websites

"Its the done thing"

This is often the motivation behind having a website. Its true, the absense of a website could be bad for your image. But a poor website can be downright damaging to your image. So when you get a website, make sure its good, otherwise its better not to have one at all.

Great website, but whats it selling?

When deciding on the website, you need to be sure that the website makes you (or your company/products/services) look good ... rather than making the website designer look good.

You don't want people to say "great website", you want them to say "great products", and you want them to return to the site later.

Keep it simple

The website should be functional and clean. It should tell your customers the vital information immediately. It should appear quickly on their screen, and it should not make the computer "bog down" once its on the screen.

There is nothing worse that websites that are slow, pop up windows, have flashing signs, or things that move around annoyingly.

Search Engine Optimisation

Be aware that there are some con-artists out there.

There is really no way (now) to get a high ranking in search engines, other than to have a good site that tells your story well, and that draws people back to it.

You do need to write using language that your customers will use if they were to describe you. This is for two reasons:

to get your message across effectively, and
so that when they type in a search phrase to Google, it finds you.

Google does its searching based on the content in your site. So the words you write will be the words it finds.

Google rates your site based on the maturity and relevance of the information, and its popularity. Its popularity is mainly based on how many links point in to your site. Reciprocal links are not worth so much for this purpose.

Your main page must be concise and to the point, but you also need other pages that add more and more information that your customers will consider worth re-visiting. You need to provide some free information. This will entice them back, and also increase the likelihood that other sites link to yours.

Seek out a good SEO, and if they start by telling you something like the above, then you can trust them. Take their advice regaring domain names, headings, advertising, posting your site etc...

Web Marketing

The Google adwords marketing system is extremely effective, but it has a lot of parameters that you need to tune. For example, it depends on your type of product or service. E.g. if you are a guest house, your custommers mostly won't be booking on a whim, but they will have already made headway with their plans. Likely they will search in Google. So there is no point being advertised on content partner sites. You want to be advertised only in the search engine. Then choice of keywords is vital, and tuning of the adwords system, especially in the first couple of weeks, is equally vital... otherwise your money will be spent but to no avail.