When I say Points to consider, I mean just that. I am not going to tell you how to design your page, that is for you to do. I am going to discuss some Ideas and you will then, with a bit of imagination, make up your own mind about how you will design your pages. Everyone has different tastes and ideas and hearing one person's idea often sparks off a bigger and better idea in someone else's mind.

This is a list of things to consider. The order is not set in stone. You may make a change at the bottom of the list that would make you reconsider a decision made higher ion the list. But we will discuss them in this order.

Subject matter.

Layout.

Colour.

Images.

SEO

Subject Matter

What is it all about? Very likely you already have some idea of what your site is going to be about. Let us say for example you own a garden centre you have decided to build a site dealing with gardening products to widen your net and reach more buyers. You may not think it is necessary for me to state the obvious here, but? The content of your site must deal strictly with gardens and gardening issues, e.g. Garden D'cor, Garden Furniture, Garden Fountains and Garden Plants etc. You would be surprised how many sites have content that is irrelevant to the advertised subject of the site.

If your content is not as it should be it may confuse the spiders. Spiders are computer programs that index the internet for search engines. If they can not get a clear picture of what your site is all about they are unlikely to rank your site very highly and you are unlikely to be seen where it counts, i.e. the search results. (more about that later)

You will most likely already have a vast knowledge of gardening. This is a major advantage when building a website because you can produce your own content. You will not need to employ the services of an expert to advise on the gardening issues that arise in connection with your content.

However, you may need to employ the services of a copywriter. This is someone who is skilled in the art of writing copy and articles and generally using your content to sell your products from your page. If you want to sell anything on your web page you will need to have well written content that converts a browser into a buyer.

Layout

How you layout your site is almost as important as the content you have in it. The site should be easy to navigate and you should have a clear idea of where you are at all times and how to get to where you want to be without too much difficulty.

Many web designers understand this to mean that they have to have a link to every page on every page. That is a big mistake. It is far better to lay out your site like a book. A book has an index, chapters and pages. You always know where you are in a book.

In my view the best way to do this is to have a list of the chapters on all pages, e.g. in your navigation bar, usually at the top of the page where it is easily seen. Then when the visitor clicks on the link to the chapter they will have a menu of links to the content for that chapter. This way the website is broken into manageable pieces and they do not get lost.

However, do not do too much breaking down and have your content too deep in the site or your visitor may get bored or frustrated and leave.

The text size is very important. If it is too big, people will feel that you are shouting at them and anyway it is very difficult to make large text look good. If it is too small it will be difficult to read and not everyone knows how to adjust their browser to increase the size of their text. Difficult to read means that your visitor will not read and is unlikely to buy.

Colour

We all have different tastes so it is very difficult to advise on colour. The content of your site will to some extent dictate how you use colour in the design of your website. For example since you are building a gardening you will very likely have a lot of green in your images. This will mean that you will need some green tints here and there to highlight some other areas and match the green in the images.

Do not go overboard with the green (except maybe on St. Patrick's Day) piping on the web site. It is only to be used sparingly around the edges so to speak. This applies to any other site also. If you are building a website for Valentines Day and have a lot of red in the images you will not need too much on the page itself.

The content should always be black against a white background. Studies have shown that this is the easiest combination for people to read. If you want them to read your content then this is the way. However, you will sometimes find that the black on white colouring does not suit the rest of your site and you can change it. When you do, bear in mind that people will need to be able to read it easily or they will go and find content they can read.

Images

Images are closely tied in with the colour and layout of your website. Image files are typically much larger than text files. This means that they take longer to load. If your visitor is on a dial-up connection to the internet this means that s/he will not be happy about a page filled with images that are taking forever to load.

Pages without images are dull and boring no matter what colour the text and background. You must have some images. In our example, the gardening website, it is particularly necessary. After all nobody would buy a plant from you based solely on the colourful description you give them. Just keep the size of the file reasonable.

Bigger is not always better. Some web designers link the image to a larger image so that those who want to get a look at the bigger picture can do so by clicking the small one. This way everyone is happy. It is a good idea to have text and images side by side on the page so that your visitor will have something to read while waiting for the image to load.

Spread out the images on the page. Do not have them all at the top or all at the bottom etc. If they are all at the top and taking too long to load it looks as if there is nothing happening and your visitor will leave.

SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. This is all about configuring your page so that it looks its best for the search engines. In other words making the search engines think your page or website is better than the others out there and showing it higher in the search results.

If I knew everything about that I would be a multi-millionaire. The people who write the programs for the search engines give away very little. What we do know we know from groups of web designers pooling the information they have picked up from the results they have had form changes they have made to their websites. Google also have a page of advice for web designers on their site. This is useful but far from good enough to guarantee high placement simply by following the advice therein.

There are basically two types of SEO, on page and off page. On page optimisation refers for the most part to keywords, content and navigation. Off page optimisation is all about getting links to your site. In spite of all the information you will find about on page SEO, there is little doubt among web designers that off page SEO is by far the more important. Of course, if your on page SEO is not up to scratch you may not get others to link to your pages and that is your off page SEO gone up in smoke.

On page SEO

The three main points here are keywords content and navigation. Keywords and content are tied so we will discuss them together. Keywords are only keywords on a website. On a search engine they are called search terms. When writing the content for your site you will need to ensure that the content for each page is filled with the words that people will enter into the search engines to find that page.

In our example the words, garden and gardening should figure highly in the text for the main page and probably all of the pages. However, the page where you are selling products related to organic gardening should have content relevant to and including the phrase organic gardening.

Meta tags are the tags at the top of the page code. There are many possible meta tags, but the two main ones we will deal with here are the keywords and description tags. Very few search engines pay them much attention these days, though there was a time when all you had to do to guarantee a high ranking was to have the most keywords in your keyword tag. Now there is a real danger of losing page rank for spamming if you have too many keywords in the tag or on your page.

At the time of writing, there is much debate about the usefulness of these tags but it is agreed that having them does no harm to your website's standing anywhere. Therefore I would strongly recommend that you use them.

The keyword meta tag tells the spiders what keyword searches you would like to be directed to your page. It gives them an impression of what the page is about. These days the spiders check the page themselves and make up their own "minds" about what the page is about.

The description meta tag describes what the page is about. Again you need to include a couple of your main keywords here. Partly because some of the search engines use this tag to describe the page in the search results. Others just pick random sentences from your content.

The title tag is an opportunity to use more keywords. Many designers neglect this opportunity and just put the company name there. However, if in our example the garden centre was named Flowers For All there is no likelihood of it being found with a search for Garden Centre. A better title would be Flowers For All Garden Centre.

You should always use the h tags. h1 and h2 tags are very important. They show the spiders what is important on your page. Always Always Always use them.

Off Page SEO

This is all about getting links to your sites. The better the quality of the site the more the link from them is worth. That is, a link from amazon.com or godaddy.com is worth more than most other links on the net. The more successful the site the better the link from them is. Apart from anything else the link is likely to bring an abundance of traffic to your site, which is the point of the exercise in the first place. Right?

The sites will also have a bigger and better effect on your rankings if they are relevant i.e. on a related subject. A link from another successful gardening site would be far better that one from a website about fashion. You will still get some benefit from the link, but is will be a fraction of what you get from the related website.

So far I have been talking about one-way links from other sites. But another type of link which has taken off like a rocket is the reciprocal link. This is when you make a deal with another site to link to each other. This gives each of you the opportunity to get traffic from each other's site and also to improve your own page rank by having another inward link.

The effectiveness of this practice is said to be diminishing rapidly as its popularity increases. (For some reason the search engines always seem to put an end to things that work)

One-way inward links in abundance seems to be the best way to increase your rankings in search engines today.

Get listed in search directories. If you are not in directories you are less likely to be found. The big ones are obvious, i.e. Google, Yahoo!, MSN etc. But there are a lot of very successful search directories out there that get millions of searches per day and are underrated by many web designers. Just get listed wherever you can, but avoid the submission programs that completely automate this for you. Many directories consider this to be spamming and block the site from ever being on their directory.

Summary

In the past a web designer was not there to SEO your web site. He would design and build the site and then you went to an SEO expert to have it SEO'd. This is still the case in some companies, though competition has meant that most quality web design companies now combine these two services to give a better service.

If you are designing and building your own site, my advice to you is "Don't sweat the little stuff". Your website does not have to be perfect the first day out. You can continue to work on it and improve it and see what works and what doesn't. Never forget that the programmers ar constantly refining their software and the spiderd therefore keep changing and your site may rise and fall at the whim of a programmer somewhere who has never seen your site.

Keep it clean. Don't be tempted to use any dirty tricks you see somewhere else to get your site to the top. This does not last and can get your site banned from search engines.