The new era of web design
Design is getting easier and cheaper, but no guarantee of online success
"The web newbie is being offered more easy and cheap
web design alternatives than ever before. But web design is still is far less
important to the health of your site than content and focus..."
Looking around on the web you'd think we'd entered a new era
of easy and cheap web design. Here are some trends I've noticed...
First, most hosting outfits will now bundle a
"site-in-a-box" design package with their hosting offerings. They'll also
submit your site to 300,000 or so "search engines" in order to guarantee you
virtually instant traffic. The claim is that you can "be up and running" in
about five minutes or less, drawing awesome numbers of eager surfers to your
site. Problem is, nobody gets listed in the SEs that quickly, and
besides, you need something for them to look at (listen to, read, etc.) once
they get there. That's called CONTENT. And if you have none, your site will be
a bust. You cannot possibly create a content-rich site in anything less than
several weeks, or more likely several months. Sorry, but that's just the way
it is.
Second, some vendors, online merchants, ebook publishers,
and general web product floggers will give you a "fully functional website",
for FREE. You don't have to do anything. You're basically just the stiff who
puts his name on the "site". They even provide the content — which, of course
is a catalogue page for their wonderful products. This seems like a no-lose
proposition. Right. All you lose is valuable time. Because once you discover
you can't make any sales from such a site without traffic, and you realize you
can't get any traffic without either advertising (surprise!), or playing the
Search Engine ranking game, you've wasted several valuable weeks that could
have been spent on other things. You're several weeks closer to giving up
entirely on the online marketing thing.
Third, there are incredibly powerful "CMS" (Content
Management Software) packages out there that allow you to build a database
driven site so you can run things like daily journals, "blogs", libraries of
articles, reviews, commentary, daily news, classified ads, etc., etc., etc. —
and all of this content is fully searchable. These sites are another example
of the "site-in-a-box" concept at work, and they usually look pretty cool too,
because they have been heavily influenced by the online gamer culture.
Although the idea is that registered members of the "community" will make
contributions, this rarely happens. Typically they are filled with very
niche-oriented stuff of interest only to the blogger and his/her buddies, or a
relatively small group of techie-types interested primarily in writing
software to extend the capabilities of the under-utilized software they
already have. Forums tend to get dominated by people with a lot of spare time
on their hands, and a healthy respect for their own opinions. Sites like this
also have little chance of scoring well with the SEs because they are
"dynamically" generated. There are no "pages" in the ordinary sense that SEs
are normally looking for.
Fourth, Microsoft has finally made serious inroads with
Front Page. Coming from a graphic design and advertising background, I
always felt that eventually a tool like Front Page would win out in the web
page design wars. Why? Because it gives you a very powerful combination of
WYSIWIG design features along with site management tools that virtually
eliminate the need to mess with things like FTP (don't you just hate FTP!)
If you don't have the faintest idea what I'm talking about,
then Front Page is the web design tool you should be using. Once you get used
to it, you won't settle for anything else. Yes, it has its very aggravating
bad habits, and it implements proprietary methods of doing things that won't
work on a site that isn't FP-enabled. But the benefits far outweigh the
deficits.
Check out this website for more details.
And now that it's become standard for web hosts running
Linux servers to offer FP-enabled sites, we're starting to see a serious
number of add-ons being written for FP to make it a more robust design tool.
You can find some of these at sites like
frontpagetools.com.
Having said all that, it continues to amaze me how many
really baaaad looking sites score well in the SEs. The web is about CONTENT,
and the SEs could care less about design. They don't see your site, they just
read it. And, surprisingly, that fact of life seems to carry over to people as
well. The best performing links, for instance, are not fancy looking ads, but
rather boring old text links. Surfers see those flashy banner ads and their BS
meter starts flashing. Text links, on the other hand, look like an
endorsement.
So the best, and most successful sites continue to be the
ones with the best content. Design is not un-important. But it certainly won't
bring you success.
Richard J. Hendershot,
www.small-business-online.com
This article is called "The new era of web design".
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