If you are considering setting up a website, then chances are that you will be keen on seeing that the website you start turns out to be a success - one of the keys to having a successful website is proper web design.
Web design is about the graphical layout and presentation of content on the website. It is, indeed, one of the things that can make or break a website. It is therefore something that you cannot take lightly.
On the crowded Internet of today never has it been more important to have good content well presented to engage the site visitor and encourage return visits. A set of criteria for constructing web pages and adding content is an essential building block to achieve this. The set of criteria I have chosen focus on the key points that will make a page accessible, inviting and useful to the visitor and will encourage return visits or continued inter-action with the site. F.L.I.A is the acronym for my criteria – F (fast) L (layout) I (information) A (action). By having a memorable title I find it easy to reference the core principles of a good web page in the first instance without the need for a pile of reference books on the desk whilst writing/designing. Of course every site is a different challenge so further referencing is always needed but by following my FLIA criteria I find I have a basic ‘Road Code’ to start with.
So you are a business owner and you have a website or maybe you are thinking of getting a website for your company. Do you actually know what your website is for and what functions it should have in order to have an impact on your business? A website serves many functions for a business as well as being a stand alone model for the business itself.
The best place to start when researching your target audience is in your thinking. Try putting yourself in the shoes of someone who will be using the website. What age would they be, what gender etc. Are they looking for information, or interaction, or both. Why would they use the internet rather than the Yellow Pages etc? What sort of computer/internet users would they be?
The more you know about your target audience the more you can tailor the words on the site to meet their needs. So a well written web site is one where the target audience feels comfortable, can find what they want quickly and easily and is happy to be enticed into action (eg subscribing or buying products or services). In order to judge whether or not the web site has met the needs of its target audience, try and imagine the target audience and look at the content, terminology, navigation, style and tone etc. Ask yourself how well the needs of the target audience are being met. How well do you think the writer understood the target audience? Did they conduct enough research before they started writing?
100 Useful Web Tools for Writers
I am nearing the end of the New Zealand Open Polytechnic “Writing for the Web” Certificate 
and this link [ 100 Useful Web Tools for Writers ] has been solid gold for ideas, reference and inspiration. Good writing and communication are essential for your web presence. A fascinating subject and one that is all to often overlooked at the design and development stage. The “100 useful…” link above is a great resource for any one interested in good writing on the web, whether a seasoned pro. or just starting out, it covers it all from mind mapping to planning and beyond.
If you start out to write some content and are too focused on keywords I think it is all too easy to write a piece of crap (as can be witnessed on many, many pages out there at the mo’). Google is well up on people playing tricks with meta tags and in its (excellent) webmaster tools section will actually give you a table of site keywords (as it sees them) once you have submitted your site and it has been crawled. it also shows which search phrases are pertinent to your keywords so you can then start fine tuning your copy. My approach is to write your content naturally, look at what you have written and this will include your keywords – naturally. you’ve just written them – that’s what your story/blog/piece is about after all. No wonder the ‘experts’ can’t agree about keywords, they are just words that ‘normal’ people are punching into Google. We know that Google is over meta tags but still index’s them because they have their place. Google’s first piece of advice in it’s webmasters section is to produce a “focused” site, which to me reads as “don’t get to hyped about keywords we can see what you’ve done and will rank it accordingly” and don’t try to be all things to all web surfers, someone who lands on your site or reads your copy will thank you for a genuine piece rather something full of “buzz/key words”.
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