September, 2009 | Dangerous Common Sense

Postcards from the Edge

I am currently working on two web sites which were originally created by graphic designers. They are very pretty. Pretty enough to be postcards. But, they also are inflexible and difficult to work with. To me, they are postcards from the edge of web design purgatory.

If you’re about to hire a web designer, make sure that they are not proposing to take a postcard-perfect graphic and make it the template for your new site design without agreeing that the site will be flexible and will comply with industry standards.

The postcard web page designs I am working with were originally created in Photoshop or GoLive. Unfortunately, taking the great look from a design package like Photoshop and making it into an HTML/XHMTL web page is not something that these programs do well. Even though the software brags about its ability to output an HTML page from the graphics, it does it poorly.

These programs make their pages with tables and slices of images to construct the backgrounds and borders for the web page. Although the pages they produce claim to be standards compliant, they are not. For example, one design I am editing specifies that it is compliant with the XTML 1 Transitional standard, but it uses a non-compliant “height” attribute on table cells to achieve the spacing between its various page components.

Yeah, that’s pretty technical and the value of valid XHTML code is a subject for another post. But, here’s something that I can show visually.

These postcard web pages were designed to be a specific height. The graphic designers each dislike scrolling down web pages so they oriented them horizontally and limited the space on each page for text. If there is more text or graphics on the page than initially conceived by the designer, the page falls apart.

Here’s how one of the pages looks when only a small amount of text is typed on the page. It looks great:

But here is how that same page looks when “too much” text is added to the page, “too much” being more than fits in the fixed-size gray block:

Rather than making a template ready for expanding text, this box design disintegrates apart when additional lines of information is added to the page.

Web pages must be able to expand downward. You cannot guarantee that all the information on a topic will fit into a set number of words. In fact, top-ranking pages in Google generally have over 400 words on it, and that much information won’t fit on most postcards.

In addition, you can see that the photograph of the adorable boy is created in three slices. This means if the site owner wants to create new pages using a different photograph or change this photograph, a web designer would have to slice the new photograph into three slices of the exact same size. That’s at least three times as much work and it’s also a mess to track.

The situation was very limiting for the site owner who contacted me. He couldn’t add more pages or information to his website, and he wanted to tell web visitors about his expanding business.

He liked the colors and looks of the site created by the graphic designer, but he wanted his web site to attract and inform potential clients.

I was able to re-create the look of the page while using standards-compliant XTHML code. The column with the picture no longer breaks apart if the text on the right side shrinks or grows. New pages with new photos can be added easily.

As I write this, the new design is just live and the site owner and I am considering what information we want to add first. He has sample cost and cost-recovery spreadsheets to share, photos of his installation and equipment options, more information on options for residents and businesses. Look at this San Francisco solar power installation site, and see how the one-static postcard design now will support growth.

Graphic designers can create excellent looking web designs. If you engage a graphics person, I recommend one of two options. First, ask your graphics designer to agree to creating an expandable, XHTML, css standard-compliant site. If they don’t understand your request or say that they don’t be bothered with standards, ask that they create just the design. Then take the layout to a web designer for a XHTML, Cascading Style Sheet (css) web template.

The prettiest postcard sites will disappoint you if they don’t attract new clients and tell people about your business. Don’t be afraid to be as opinionated about the web site’s functionality as you are about its visual appearance!

Picking the One Phrase that Will Get Your Site the Most Visitors

New clients start off by telling me that they want their site to show up on the top of Google search results. My response usually stumps them: “For what phrase do you want to be #1 ?”

As I posted last week, you can tune a web page for just one phrase, and most business owners don’t know what their best money-making phrase is. Selecting the right keyword phrase will get your site visitors. Picking the wrong one will mean your work is invisible and a bad return on your website investment.

Here are 2 tips to help you pick the right keywords for your web pages:

Pick phrases that are specific.

If you are offering a guided tours of the Alaska wilderness around Prince William Sound, you don’t want to tune your page for “vacation”, even if people buy your guide service as part of their vacation. “Vacation” is too generic, and most people looking to go on a vacation have another destination in mind. Perhaps they’re even thinking of a tropical resort.

You’ll be better off selecting a phrase such as “Alaska wilderness vacations” or even “Prince William Sound guided tours”. If people type those phrases into Google and find your site, they are much more likely to want your services than someone looking to bake on a beach in Puerto Vallarta.

Similarly, if you are selling a product, you should tune the web page for a longer phrase instead of a generic one.

Web visitors looking for Nike Mercurial Vapor Superfly shoes are going to be overwhelmed with choices when they enter “athletic shoes” as a Google search term. Visitors are also going to have a lot of choices if they search for “Nike shoes”. Soon these web browsers are going to wise up and search for what they really want, “Nike Mercurial Vapor Superfly”.

Your web page should be tuned for that phrase so that you can snag those motivated customers!

Find a phrase that is searched for a lot and which doesn’t have that many competing web pages.

This is a tricky task, but it’s one that can make or break your site. If there are 100 searches a day in Google for “San Francisco limousine service” and already 10,000 sites published with that phrase, it is going to be difficult to rank on the top of Google’s result list. If there are also 100 searches a day for “San Francisco limo service” and only 100 sites published with that phrase, you should tune your new web page for the phrase with fewer potential competitors.

Finding the most effective keywords is one of the tasks of Search Engine Optimization specialists such as Ozdachs Consulting. I use two tools to identify cost-effective keywords: Google AdWords and Wordtracker.

Google AdWords

Google’s advertising program AdWords tools includes a screen which shows the number of searches for a particular term and the number of other people bidding for that term. The number of competitors is not quantified and is only described in terms like “Very high advertiser competition”. And, the number of advertisers doesn’t directly translate to the number of web pages with the keyword term. Still, the AdWords provides a free glance at what people are searching for and the number of people competing against you.

Wordtracker

Wordtracker is specifically designed to find the terms which are most searched for with the least competition. Wordtracker has created proprietary algorithm that produces a Key Effectiveness Index (KEI) that provides a numeric value to indicate the quality of a search term.

When you find a keyword phrase with a high KEI, you should tune your page for that highly-searched-for rarely-appearing term. Unfortunately, in my experience, there are few terms with a high KEI that relate to my clients’ real-world business.

Wordtracker is also relatively expensive, $60 for a month of access to their database of searches and web page competition. Running a search for a client with a small website takes at least a couple hours of my consulting time, so the price of selecting a better keyword for tuning can be several hundred dollars.

Nevertheless, I recommend to my clients that they buy a Wordtracker subscription for a month and have me use it. We don’t want to overlook a money-making phrase to tune a web page for. I’d hate to have my San Francisco CPA’s miss out because neither they nor I thought to tune a page for “independent public accounting firms”.

Picking The One Phrase That Will Get You the Most Business

Both Google’s AdWords Tools and Wordtracker will point out keyword phrases that you can tune your web pages for to get the most number of visitors to your site.

But, you and your Search Engine Optimization expert need to use common sense in tuning your site. Don’t go after visitors for a phrase that isn’t going to make you any money! If you are renting a vacation home in Puerto Vallarta you may tune for many different phrases that relate to your business. However, just because you see that “Puerto Vallarta food poisoning” is searched for a lot and there are few sites with information on that topic, it doesn’t mean that you’ll get more customers for your vacation rental if you publish a spiffy page on diagnosing, treating, and avoiding food poisoning in that city!