The phrase “web design strategy means a range of different things to different people, and involves more than merely “design decisions. The term seems to imply that the issue is about color, page layout and the use of Flash animations. Yes, these factors are part of the big picture, but the “bigger picture is about the overall design of your website, meaning its entire “architecture.

You need to find out how your site’s overall “information architecture affects its visibility to search engines. The truth is, specific web page elements like your navigation scheme and technologies like CSS (Cascading Style Scripts) or JavaScript can either interfere with or aid a search engine’s ability to “spider and rate your site. Sometimes an element can do both, at the same time!

The whole topic of a “site architecture or web design strategy that supports Search Engine Marketing (SEM) has really been quite poorly addressed. Many companies that do SEM consulting have less than state-of-the-art knowledge of how information architecture and design strategy affect a site’s usability and organic rankings. If your consultant, or your own research, is focusing only on search advertising, media buys and bidding processes, you are not getting the whole picture.

A top position in the Google results is useless if site visitors aren’t being converted into buyers. A successful site architecture and site design strategy will address the needs of both the search engines and your visitors/customers.
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1: Browser/platform compatibility

Your visitor expects your site to work in their browser/platform at all times.

Solution – provide a site that works in all modern browsers and platforms.

Benefits – He or she can now wait for your site to load knowing that – at the least, they can access it. (First base is a major step!)

2: Load time

Your visitor is very very impatient and has the attention span of a 15 year old grey haired dog with arthritis in it’s knees and a bowl with no dog food in it.

Solution – provide him/her with a super quick loading web site.

Benefits – He or she will be so pleased they may just look further into your web site and see if it holds them to interest.

3: Design

Your visitor is very critical and expects a professional design at least for their time.

Solution – provide him or her with a very nice, clean and professional layout.

Benefits – He or she will be impressed and may decide to venture even further.

4: Navigation

Your visitor is on the prowl and wants to find what they are looking for yesterday.

Solution – provide him or her with a navigation system that enables a quick and an effective route to what they are looking for.

Benefits – He or she will be very pleased they may spend some time on your site discovering if what they found is of value to them.

5: Content

Your visitor demands the very best – best being 22 carrot gold not that awful gold plated rubbish.

Solution -provide him or her with up to the date content that is easy to understand, writing and produced well and to the point.

Benefits – He or she will be very pleased they may even bookmark your site for future reference.

Access + quick loading + professional design + excellent navigation + great content = a very competent web site that should serve the purpose of both yourself and more importantly your visitors.

In these days and age people are demanding more from a web site and so they should. There is no excuses any more. We have all the tools available to build competent web sites to a professional standard. We don’t have to be a pro we just need tounderstand the visitor more – and boy are they/we demanding.

Just about anyone with a computer and an internet connection can make a website. Creativity and purpose though, solely rests on the author’s shoulders.  There are plenty of free web hosting services out there and you only have to look for one that suits your needs. Features like customizability, available space, uploading/downloading method and scripting are usually what sets these free hosting sites apart from one another. If you find these sites too limiting for you, paid web hosting sites are available and they do provide more advanced features like larger web spaces and a more intuitive interface for site management. The good support, bandwidth and uptime percentage absolutely makes the paid web hosting sites a favorite for people who are trying to create a website for their business.

Whether you are putting up a website for your business or if you are just a hobbyist, you will have needs that both the paid and free web hosting sites won’t be able to satisfy. That’s where tools that enhance your website comes in. Like a site director supervising in an actual physical site, the webmaster needs certain tools and apparatus’ that are essential in running a website. Basic web tools like guest books, counters and link checkers are some of the staple tools that every good website should have. Aside from increasing the efficiency of your website, these tools also enable site administrators to gather some statistical data that will help in the upkeep and development of the site.

A byproduct of that statistical data, personally, is the gratifying or dejecting experience to see how many hits you had (or lack of it) in your site for one day or since its inception. More advanced web tools like meta-tag generators, link popularity and Google predictors assist in making your site’s net presence more visible to a bigger and more relevant crowd. More utilities and tools that function to augment your website are out there. Fortunately, there are websites that exist for the sole purpose of being a “toolbox” for webmasters. These nifty sites are invaluable in that aside from providing free tools, they also include information about how to use the tools provided.

Nothing is more frustrating than having to figure things out for yourself in a trial and error manner, which consumes too much time. Crafting, constructing and designing will really be easier and faster with the aid of these toolbox websites. The time you save in formatting, organizing and devising your website can be used in making or researching for the content on your site. Content being the primary reason as to why people would visit your site.

What better way to get you started on the internet than by making your presence known via your own personal website. And, what better way to create the perfect site than to use free and readily available tools in the net. If you know your way around cyberspace then you’ll surely appreciate the advanced tools that make maintaining and gathering information from your website a breeze.

No matter how hard some people try to mystify SEO, it is not as complicated as many would lead you to believe. Despite all the techno jargon that many in the field will throw at you: SERPs, SEM, PageRank, Keyword Density, Vertical Search, Algorithms… SEO is really simple to do if you understand some basic concepts and follow some easy steps.

Search Engine Optimization is getting your content listed in all the top positions in Google, Yahoo and MSN for your targeted keywords. When someone does a keyword search in a search engine for your particular subject or niche – you want your site or content to be at the top of the list.
Here are 10 SEO tactics that have worked and are working for me at this moment in time.

1. Quality Content is and always will be your number one factor for getting high rankings and keeping them. You must understand search engines are simply businesses who supply a product like any other company. That product is information. They must offer quality results to anyone using their service to solve a problem, answer a question or to buy a product. The more relevant, the more targeted the search solution they return, the higher the overall quality of their product and the more popular their search engine will become. Providing quality content is vital for SEO success.

2. Keywords are your number one tools for achieving high rankings. You must understand keywords and how they work on the web. You must know how many searches are made each day for your chosen keywords. Sites like Wordtracker and Seobook will give you a rudimentary number of searches. Design your pages around your targeted keywords and don’t forget to do some deep-linking to these pages on your site. Find and build backlinks to these interior keyword pages and not just to your home page or domain URL. Picking keywords with medium to low competition has worked out well for me. So too has using the more targeted and higher converting “long-tail” keywords been very beneficial for me.
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The Webmaster or Web Manager is a strange and varied beast, something of a jack-of-all-trades. The role demands an attitude that supports self-help, constant upskilling, and a vigilant eye on technology. A Webmasters responsibilities can vary greatly between organisations of various types and sizes.

It’s not unusual for a Webmaster to be expected to posses some skill and take part in a range of traditional IT roles for web related services or projects.

Irrespective of who traditionally performed them, following are some typical tasks that are potentially a Webmaster’s responsibility in a larger organisation with one or more web servers.

- Educating Authors and Customers
- Generating Log Reports
- Publishing & Managing Content
- Securing the Website and Servers
- Managing user/group accounts
- Interacting with clients
- Monitoring/Tuning server Performance
- Server-side Programming / ASP or PHP
- Client-side scripting / DHTML and JavaScript
- Templates creation for Authors
- User & Technical Documentation
- Upskilling & Following technology
- Website promotion and SEO

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