The design of a website is critical to getting the user to have the experience that you want when visiting a site. Too many people either get what we refer to as SEO tunnel vision or they get so caught up in the look that they have envisioned that they forget that the purpose is to actually motivate the consumer or visitor to take action.

Great design does it all. It creates a search engine friendly environment where the customer (in a business website) feels comfortable about being there, but is compelled to take action by the elements on the screen. To get a truly great business website design, it often takes several people working together to build a holistically great site.

The Designer – That would be me. I work as a full time freelance designer and as a part time designer with WaterfrontWebWorks.com as time allows. My role is to bring the whole package together, to collaborate with all of the individuals and tie it into one cohesive package.

The SEO and Marketing people – Frankly it is hard to get designers to work well with SEO and marketing people and vice versa, because they think they are competing. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. To succeed, they HAVE to not only work together, but share ideas.

The business person – This is one that most designers miss. They do not bring the business person, who knows the nuances of the business . into the process until it is too late. They design the site and then do not offer creative involvement with these people and that affects the design. Unless I have been designing websites for a specific industry for YEARS, I know I will miss something.

The bottomline is this.. bringing all of these people together is time consuming, frustrating and adds cost. Yet it is completely worth it if you want to have a great business site that will convert people into customers.

Do it once. Do it well. Do it right.

When working on a real estate website (or any other really) sometimes you want to make changes to the structure of a site. What this means is basically, if you change the format of the file names of your site, then you want to make SURE that the web people you work with redirect EACH PAGE of the old site to the corresponding page on the new site.

Why is this important?

The first reason is that you want users who happen to click on links to the old pages that may be out there to be able to find the RIGHT information on the new site. This makes sense. They should not go to the home page or a generic looking page that say 404 Error File not here… Yes, it takes time to do this but it is important.

I recently saw a major real estate site NOT do this and lose a major amount of traffic. (Which is the OTHER reason.) When a site has pages that no longer exist, eventually they get dropped from the search engines and all of the traffic that you were getting from the search engines goes away. Not good.

Doing redirects is EASY but it takes time. Many sites have the ability to do redirects right in the content management system (my real estate site does.). But if that is not the case, your website administrator will be able to do it. Yes it make cost you an hour or two, but it is worth it.

It costs you too much in GETTING people to visit your site to just make them go away confused and frustrated.