van der Wyk Design: Designer’s Notebook

You know the routine, right?  Over and over again, those familiar with gearing websites up to receive plentiful traffic talk about the essential need to receive lots of quality in-pointing links to your site.  And scoring plenty of these natural (and preferably on topic) links is certainly essential.

Incoming Links Matter…

But the little known component of a solid high-performing link strategy is that your website’s outgoing links matter too.

And do they ever!  Here’s the thing—search engines place substantial investment of their efforts in measuring which websites will best satisfy their own customers when a specific keyword term is searched for via the search engine.  With so many businesses and websites out there competing for a fair share of that natural source of incoming traffic, the key typically ends up being focusing more on scoring as many in-pointing links as possible to boost the site’s link popularity—and therefore, to hopefully boost search positioning.

But Search Engines Are Smarter Than That!

The search engines are smart.  Again, because they have a significant interest in providing their searchers the very best quality, accurate results, they aren’t so easily manipulated with just tons of incoming links as many of the unscrupulous practitioners of search engine optimization (SEO) would have you believe.

Why Outgoing Links?

Your website’s incoming link popularity is a major factor, but having outgoing links placed naturally and strategically helps to show that you’re not just in it all for yourself.  When you link outwardly from your informational content to external sites that will also provide true value for your visitors, you’re playing a more active and responsible role in the overall web community.

The search engines pick up on this.  It’s natural for their algorithms to assume that websites that give back to their visitors and their overall niches’ community by offering no-obligation links to other relevant and helpful sites are the same sites that are just much less likely to be greedy with an “it’s all about me approach.”  It’s really all about give and take—kind of like the golden rule.

It’s The Right Thing To Do.

So, go ahead and link to your organization’s friends and other great sites that you feel might help your visitors—it’s the right thing to do.  The search engines understand what you’re doing and if you’re doing it for the right reasons, it will probably help your rankings even more.

One final piece of advice though…don’t go overboard with external linking.  Sites that the search engines deem to have too many outgoing links are considered to be “link farms,” and penalized as such.  You’ll be perfectly safe if you keep it to just a couple well thought out links per page.

When it comes to designing or re-designing a website, there are many ways to approach the project. Some clients have in mind a certain look they want to achieve, while others focus on features the site should have. When I start any new project, one of the most important questions I can ask my clients is ‘Who is your target audience?’ The answer to this question informs the style, structure, features, layout, and language of the site.

Flesh out your “user”

When identifying the target audience for a site, I like to think of the audience as a specific person. I think of the age demographic and choose the average age. More male or female? Average income? Taste in movies, books and lifestyle in general are all part of this character.

Building the blueprint

When my user goes to this site, what are they looking for? Information or products for sale? Perhaps they would like to listen to music.  What is the easiest way for them to get what they need? The features and function of the website are calculated based on these questions. Structure is next: what style of navigation is easiest for this user? Which pages should be presented first? My approach to navigation is that it should be obvious so my user does not have to figure out a maze, but can automatically find where to go. If there are subpages, the category title should be simple and very descriptive.

Coloring the design “skeleton”

When I have my features and navigation structure planned, it is time to think about style and language. It is important to me to represent the brand well in these designs, so I start with the logo and identity for color and style, but always keeping in mind my user. What would they like to see? Glossy buttons, big type, or should it look like a metal machine? and how would they like to be spoken to? Should we use a casual, cheery tone, or is a more formal, academic style appropriate?

In sum:

The most successful website (and print) designs speak directly to their intended audience using features, layout, style and language created especially for that group. They are not going to look the same, or have the same features but the commonality should be the ease of use. It is because I believe so strongly in this approach that I make custom deisgns for my clients, starting from square one every time. Every client is different, and their audiences all have different needs. And yes, of course you are invited to call for your custom design consultation, always free of charge!

Website real estate is just as precious as a plot of land, especially the top half of the screen “above the fold” in newspaper layout terms. This is the prime spot for your most important content: Brand Name, Navigation, Information about Who you Are and What you Offer. It is great to have some snappy photos or illustrations to complement your prose, but too many can clutter the space and confuse your website visitors when you’d like to be serving them.

When laying out the site for Santa Cruz Waves, we had many fantastic photos to work with as one of the partners is a photographer. At our first meeting we discussed their primary concern, which was to create a content-rich website that had a clean, uncluttered look while staying within a limited budget. Rather than create an on-screen “contact sheet” look of many thumbnails, we settled on one main area for a good size image for each page. The images cycle through in automatic (javascript) slideshows, so many images may be displayed “above the fold” without disturbing the continuity of the clean design. (To those who may counter with the idea that an image that constantly changes is distracting to the written content, a concern of mine in fact, we kept the cycle time to 4 seconds, which is pretty slow for web-browsing speeds, but not too slow to see the slides!)

Do you have a website design quandary? Contact Me for your free web design consultation.