Never let a designer design your website!

Never let a designer design your website!
You may have heard of Jane Moore, the Journalist and womens author, If you dont read the sun or girly novels, you may still know her from TV as a reviewer of the morning papers on BBC's news programme Breakfast, and now on the "Grumpy Old Women" series.
I quite enjoy listening to her comments and even find we are quite like-minded in our opinions!
Unfortunately Jane doesn't know me, if she did, it would have stopped her choosing a DESIGN team that has made BIG BIG mistakes with her website.

Luckily for Jane she has enough celebrity status that her website will still be found on the search engines, but that is the only reason why!

Rule 1. If you want your website to be viewed, don't let a design team, design your website. Why? I hear you cry, it looks great! There, you have found the problem already.

Yes it looks very good to a human eye, but search engines don't have eyes, they read text content on each page of your website. Additionally, search engines weight the importance of the content found on the home page of your website (this is the first page that you see when you type in the website address). Search engines assume that you will put include the main information about your website on your home page - so this is the page that you really want to get right!!

Designers however, are control freaks, they want their designs to look as identical online as it would in a magazine. Here's the problem, text (that search engines can read) is limited to a relatively small choice of fonts. Include the text as part of the design and you are not limited by the nasty restrictions that the web imposes, and you are in full control of how everything will appear on the screen (as long as the visitor to the website is not a search engine).

Now take a look at Jane's site; www.janemoore.com
The home page (remember this is the most important page on your site) is one big graphic, saying "Click to Enter", Oh dear! WHY WHY WHY?. This page serves no purpose whatsoever.

Total amount of readable text on the home page; NIL.
(hold down your mouse and drag across the screen, you will be able to see for yourself what graphics make up each page)

Now, "Click to Enter" the site. (we have never built a website that has a "click to enter" home page, now you know why).

Repeat the hold and drag excercise on each page, even the contact page, and you will find that every page is made up of graphics with not one word of text visible for a search engine to read.

This means that the whole website is invisible to a search engine - it's the search engine equivalent of the Sun publishing Janes column in white ink on white paper.
Additionally, as text readers for the visually impaired also rely on being able to read text, visually impaired visitors will also be kept in the dark as to the content of each page as well!

Not one word of text in the entire website!
I can't even remember the last time I came across a website which was completely invisible to a search engine.

The key point here, is to use a web development company not a design team.
I might be generalising regarding designers, but the importance of a successful website is in the development.
Take a look at the Spear-Bournemouth website, where we have ensured that the page content is separated from the website design; www.spear-bournemouth.co.uk. The website user can even select how they view the page, by selecting from a choice of designs!

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder as they say, but don't get wrapped up just on the visuals, there is a lot more to developing a website, than just uploading a pretty design!