Website Design

The “17 Ways To Boost Web Traffic” article that we are giving away this month has some good advice for getting more visitors to your website. The question I have been pondering lately is whether or not good design can increase your traffic. The conclusion I have come to is yes and no.

No, Google doesn’t care what your site looks like. However, there are things that a good designer will do when building your site that can affect your traffic. Here are 3 things you may not be aware of that a good website designer will do that can directly affect your website traffic:

1. Write clean markup
The code (markup) that exists “under the hood” of your website is what Google sees when it looks at your website. There are countless ways to write code that will result in a page that looks identical from your browser. Not all methods of code writing are equal in the eyes of Google, however. In general a good designer will write code that is short, concise, and organized. This helps Google know what your page is about and makes the process of indexing your page easier on the Google robot. And pleasing Google is a good start towards attracting website visitors.

2. Use CSS
Without getting too technical, CSS (or stylesheets) have become the industry standard for assigning a design to a website. The important thing you need to know is that css separates the content of your site from the design of your site. This results in web pages that are primed for Google.

3. Take Usability Seriously
When you are creating a website worthy of traffic you need to treat your visitors well. That’s called usability. A good designer will make it easy to use your site. Unnecessary clicks will be reduced. Navigation will be clear and friendly. Content will be organized and straightforward. When your site is easy to use people will be encouraged to return.

These are just three things that a designer considers when designing a website. While designers should be aware of how their design decisions will affect your web traffic, sadly this isn’t always the case. Some designers are more concerned with padding their portfolio than creating effective websites. Use the three items above as a way to evaluate your current designer. If he/she tries to downplay the importance of these things it may be a clue that they don’t take your project as seriously as they should. And as always give us a call if you want some more ideas about how to drive traffic to your site.

As we do every week, our website design team visits a different local restaurant for lunch and then we blog about our experience. Normally, we go out on Thursdays but with Thanksgiving, we decided to go out today instead. Today we tried a new restaurant called Windsor Asia Cafe. They’re located on 12th and Main Street in Windsor, next to Ace Hardware.

While the restaurant wasn’t very full, the decor was nice, the food was delicious and the service was great. Both Aaron and Adrian tried the Kung Pao Chicken. It was less spicy than others they have tried, but yummy, nonetheless. Jennifer went for the Combo Pad Thai and she thought it was great. Personally, I went for the Chicken with Veggies. I try to stay away from the fried dishes so this offered a healthy alternative. Each of us opted for the egg drop soup which was thick and hearty. We were pleasantly surprised by the large chunks of celery in the soup. The portions were generous. The prices were reasonable ($5.95 to $8.95) and the presentation of the food was nice as well. As creatives, we appreciated the cool, square plates and the effort that was put into plating the food. All in all, we’d each recommend the Windsor Asia Cafe. For more local restaurant reviews, please visit our blog next Thursday. Maybe we’ll try another Mexican place. Happy Thanksgiving!

Chadd

This week, your Fort Collins Website Design Company Link of the Week is a for a great site that offers information on some of the best research when it comes to increasing website conversion rates.  MarketingExperiments.com has been conducting A-B split testing and multivariate tests since the web was in its infancy.  To discover some of the many techniques that we’ve used over the years to rank other Fort Collins websites at the top of Google, review their archives.  But you won’t only find great techniques for SEO, you’ll also find hundreds of studies showing the results of their tests conducted specifically to optimize landing pages for conversion rates on things like sign-up forms, shopping carts, paid advertisements and more.   I hope you enjoy this one.  I sure do.  But then again, I’m a fanatical nerd who eats, sleeps and breathes Internet marketing.

Chadd Bryant

In Adrian’s last post, Website Credibility in a Fraction of a Second, he discussed an alarming statistic where web site visitors make up their minds about your company within the first 50 milliseconds of visiting your website.  That’s 1/20th of a second.  People are pretty good at making split decisions.  While that statistic seems frightening, it’s equally frightening that 96% of all websites have never even been read by anyone other than the person who created them.  When you consider the cost, that’s billions of wasted dollars on poor website design.  So which is really worse, not getting people to your site to read it in the first place, or having a site that portrays your company in an unprofessional light in the first 1/20th of a second?

That’s hard to say but either way, it’s critical that a site not only be designed so that your visitors can find the site using Google and other major search engines, it’s important that they perceive your company correctly from the first impression.  Miss the mark on either aspect and your site is destined to fail.

That’s why Red Rocket takes each step of the web development process so seriously.  One person can’t be expected to be an expert in all of the important aspects of your company’s website design.  The creation of an effective website requires writers, designers, programmers, photographers, seo engineers and project managers.  To think that one person could handle all of those tasks is ridiculous.  And when you consider the ramifications of missing the mark on the design or the search aspects, it’s imperative that experts are working on each part of the site, rather than just a jack of all trades who may or may not get it right.

If you’d like to sit down and speak with our team of experts and meet our web design company, please give us a call and we’d be happy to discuss your project.  Call 970-674-0079 today.