Web Design
Here are some things to consider when shopping for a for a web site:
- ACCESSIBILITY - Can people with disabilities use it? It's the law! (Americans with Disabilities Act of 1991 and Section 508 compliance)
- MAINTAINABILITY - Can changes be quickly implemented?
- PORTABILITY - Can it be viewed on cell phone browser?
- PURPOSEFUL - Will the site accomplish what you want it to do?
- SCALEABLE - Is there room to grow or will it need a redesign?
- STANDARDS - Does it conform to recommended standards or will the coding become obsolete in a few years?
- VALUE - Does the site perform as well or better than other types of advertising? Does the ROI justify the cost of creating and maintaining the site?
- SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION - Getting good rankings from the search engines brings traffic which in turn, creates sales. At least one page of your site should rank in the top twenty search results for your product or service. Is it included in the cost of the site?
Consider the following results from our site for October 23, 2011. Less than ten of our pages are optimized for the search engines, but those few dramatically increase the rankings of the rest. In 2008, we averaged 470 visitors a day with 422 of them being first-timers. They look at over 1,207 full page views and 208 image views every day - not counting spider and robot traffic!!! Our Great Pyr home page has been viewed over 53,531 times in 2008.
| Search Term | Ranking | Number of Results | Search Engine |
|---|---|---|---|
| pyr dog | 7 | 883,000 | |
| great pyr | 9 | 198,000 | |
| great pyrenees dog | 12 | 2,980,000 | |
| pyrenees guard dogs | 1 | 1,150,000 | |
| great pyrenees on the farm | 2 | 765,000 | |
| pyr puppy | 2 | 607,000 | |
| great pyr training | 1 | 64,400 | Yahoo |
| great pyr training | 1 | 275,000 | |
| great pyr training | 4 | 1,020,000 | MSN |
| universal bread mixer | 9 | 2,550,000 | |
| universal bread mixer | 4 | 4,090,000 | Yahoo |
| biblical health | 11 | 42,600,000 | |
| biblical health & nutrition | 1 | 25,700,000 | |
| organic homesteading | 1 | 1,760,000 | |
| hobby farm MN | 8 | 343,000 | |
| save money on food | 6 | 619,000,000 | |
| save money on food | 12 | 384,000,000 | Yahoo |
If you have looked at any of the code for this site, you will see it's done with Adobe's Dreamweaver. I have used Microsoft's Front Page, Adobe's Go Live and plain old hand coding. Dreamweaver offers added functionality. Once your site is designed, you can easily maintain it with Adobe's Contribute ($149) using a browser like interface. Why spend the money when you can get a free cookie cutter web site off a web host? Performance and experience with what gets traffic to your site!
BOTTOM LINE
Quality purposeful web sites. Check the Portfolio
Convert your present site to be accessible.
Search engine optimization.
Accepting select projects.
