Sunday, June 28, 2009

Web Design and Development Principles that Never Change

By Billy Remtany

I have been working in the web the industry coming up on almost ten years now! Since I've started I've seen many fads rise and fall. I've built sites in everything from plain old HTML to XHTML to DHTML and every content management system you can imagine.

With all of this experience I have noticed that while the fads do indeed come and go some things have been around from the beginning and will likely BE around as long as I am working on web sites. Three of these things includeSEO (search engine optimization), converting site visitors into your desired result, and they never ending focus on web standards. Indeed, there are lots of other things that you can work on and focus on when building a web site, by these are three things that I have noticed pop up a on almost every single the project.

Search engine optimization (SEO) seems to change on an almost daily basis. Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft are always tweaking their algorithms to return better results for search terms. While many things will change, some of the more consistent aspects of SEO include focusing on the keywords you use in your title tags as well as the keywords you use in your URLs. While meta key words and descriptions are very much a thing of the past, the hottest fads right now include social media, social networking, and blogging.

Another item that we always seem to focus on his conversions. Whether you run an online store, a blogs, or in information site, you always have a singular goal for a random site visitor. Do you want them to become a customer? Do you want them to become a repeat visitor? Do you want them to click on ads? Do you want them to stick around and read more of your website content? These are serious questions that you need to ask yourself and your client as you go about designing the web site. The total user interface should be designed around what you want the visitor to end up doing on the web site.

Web standards have always been very import important on the web. The importance of web standards can be seen simply by looking at how many different browsers there are right now. From Firefox to Internet Explorer to Safari, the your site can be looked at using many different web browsers. As such, to ensure that your site looks the same across all of these different browsers, it is important that you use standard compliant code. Not only to standard compliant code improve your site's consistency across multiple browsers, but search engines also love standards compliance and will reward you with better rankings.

So while many fads and trends may come and go, there are obviously some things on the web that are indeed here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future. Search engine optimization will always be important because search engines drive a ton of traffic. Conversions will always be important because you always want to turn a visitor into something else. And, standards compliance will always be important because the web is becoming more complex and standards help provide and place guidelines around this.

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