First you must know what the website is up against. Do a comprehensive, competitive research. You should know what the competitors’ website look like, what they offer, and what they tell about their businesses. Just like in building a house, one should know the architectural designs that are currently in fashion. One should also know the type of houses prevalent in the neighborhood where the house will be built. This same principle is applicable in websites. One should have an idea on how the competition has developed and design their websites. It can be bad for the business if your website fails to address a particular need of your target audience. Worse, that concern may have been addressed well by your competing website.

Plot your site architecture. This is similar to planning a house, and determining where one would put the rooms, and other essential furniture. Just like in a website, one has to determine the pages that will be included in the website, and the details that will be put in these pages. You might want to put up a payment processing section to allow your users to pay their purchases through credit card. A media room, meanwhile, helps members of the media to get vital information on your business. A gallery section can highlight the various products and services that your business offers.

Then, give a sensible name to your pages. This will allow users to navigate through the website with ease and convenience. First time visitors do not have the luxury of time to be able to navigate their way through the website. The pages should be named accordingly, perhaps through clever names, to be able to entice the visitors to click on their links. The name of the web pages should give exactly what the visitor is looking for. The organization of the links should be in order, so that visitors won’t waste a lot of time in looking for the information they need.

Indeed, sound arrangement of a website design will go a long way towards achieving substantial traffic and consequently, success for your online business.

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Web page design companies are facing increasing expectations from various entities. In the past years, these companies were only expected to build and design websites. These days a lot of their clients expect web design companies not just to design quality web pages but also to have these websites on top of various search engines. From this, one can say that there is a big difference between web design and search engine optimization. It’s like comparing apples and oranges.

Search engine optimization or SEO is basically a technique to put a website on top of various search engines. When somebody searches for a specific search term in Google, Yahoo or MSN, websites showing on top of the SERPS  are the ones most likely to be visited by the users. This is what SEO aims to give to a specific website owner or a business owner.

SEO is very critical to website owners since studies have shown that almost 40 percent of Internet traffic results from users typing in the keywords from these search engines. Most Internet users prefer finding websites by going to the search engines first. The inkling is that the top 10 websites ranking in the search engine for a particular keyword are the quality sites and most complete source of information for the specific information users need. Thus the top ranking websites in these search engine result pages (SERPS) normally get the most hits or sales.

In optimizing a website, it is important to focus on the optimization of the web pages and building of links. Complementary to SEO is website design. Poorly executed websites will not likely get ranked in the search engines. Websites that have quality design and easy navigation on the other hand will most likely hit the listings of search engines.

Some of the critical elements that should be arranged appropriately are text, colors, space, and graphics of the website. Custom designs, while slightly expensive than template driven designs, are more recommended particularly with the rise of cheap custom web design firms.

Web design companies are focused on the aesthetics, interface, and navigation of a website. It also looks in to how the website can serve the purposes of the organization that owns it. Website designing begins with data gathering, understanding the purpose of the site, and its target audience.

Keep in mind that web design and SEO are different from each other so it might take having two separate agencies to help you in these requirements.

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