Ebits.ie

Archive for the ‘website design’ Category

The fold is a term you may often hear when it comes to designing websites. The fold is the first page or screen that a visitor sees when they visit your site. It is deemed to be prime “virtual real estate” or VRE. What this means is that the important information should be contained in this area, or above the fold.

The actual term I believe goes back to newspapers. When you look at a folded newspaper the most important information is above the fold, that is the headline. You need to use the same principal on your website. Some people will not scroll down to the next screen. Therefore if the important information is not above the fold they might not get to read it.

The problem some people run into is that they have a big flashy banner or a large area at the top of the page with their company logo or name. On some computer screens this make take up a large percentage of the fold, thus loosing a lot of the important information on the page.

Always view your site on a number of computers to see how the computer affects the site – some sites look different when viewed on an apple. Think about those using mobile devices will they be able to see the important information?

Important information would be your headline for your product or service, and some teaser text to pull the people in to continue to read. Remember that newspapers use the inverted pyramid style. Lots of general information to pull people in at the top of the article or page, and then more details as they read on. The important thing is to get people interested.  It is important to note that visitors or at your site for 2 reasons. One for information and two to see what’s in it for them (WIIFM).  Give your readers what they want and they may give you what you want

We all like pretty things. We like to see things that are visually pleasing. This is true for websites. However it is the downfall of many websites. They spend too much time and money on making their site look pretty with graphics and flash animations and forget about the search engine optimisation of their site.

You see when you are indexed by the major search engines, they “read” the text on your page. So if you have a really cool, flashy flash movie on your page, guess what the search engines as of yet can not read the content of it.

Another thing many designers do is create text objects as graphics. This may be for menu or navigation items. Guess what? Search engines can’t read the text of these graphical items. One way around this is to do the following. Save your graphic with a descriptive name, for example business_consulting_image.jpg then use the ALT tag to describe the image.

The ALT tag is alternative text that can be read if the browser does not show the picture or if a visually impaired person is using a device or software called a screen reader. A screen reader will read the ALT tag out to the visually impaired person. Think about this it makes sense. The person will then know what the picture is about.  Regardless of search engine optimisation this is a good practice to get into.

Using CSS or cascading style sheets you can make very attractive and interesting designs and not have to over rely on graphics.

Also think with the search engine in mind, then design around this.  Remember search engines love content so give it to them and they will give you the rankings you deserve!