Keep it light, keep it bright.
Keeping things simple, makes a site easy to navigate. That is why whitespace works so well. You can basically navigate the reader’s eye to where you want it to go.

Make navigation easy
The easier the navigation, the easier it is to browse a site. When you have menus everywhere on the site with five different dropdown menus, it becomes quite difficult to find the information you need, as quickly as possible and to get the correct content across.

Make sure your website loads fast.
Not only is it great for someone visiting your site, it’s good for Google too. CSS loads faster than Javascript, so make sure your CSS files load before all others. If possible incorporate as many CSS features as you can, from bullet points, to URL’s that aren’t underlined – they all load fast!

Design for all screen resolutions
Different people have different screen sizes. The smallest your resolution size specification to design to should be 1024 x 768, and you should preferably never go smaller than that. Rather fill the screen with your brand in a nice clean way, than have it cut off where it shouldn’t.

Provide relevant content for readers
Putting lots of effort into design is nothing without good, relevant and strategic content. Make sure your site is worth something to your visitor, by providing content to inform, and immediately relevant content.

Always keep researching your content, and monitoring which pages are being visited and used, in order to keep content ever relevant and always up to scratch.

These are exceptionally useful tools, firstly for events of where source files have gone missing and changes are needed. Tools like this can also be exceptionally useful for learning purposes, where one can see the source of a SWF to gather a greater understanding of how to create their own similar applications or see a different way of thinking. It is hard to work in a vacuum, and what better way is there to learn, other than from seeing what others do? Someone once said something like, it’s the dwarf that can see the furthest when standing on the shoulders of giants.

This is exceptionally useful, however it seems all too easy for people to cross from learning from others to stealing from others… Many people just find it too easy to copy and paste. The dwarfs are now trying to be the giants…

Whatever happened to the pride of achieving something, of presenting work to the world knowing that it hatched from the egg of your own creativity?

Whilst Flash might not be perfectly indexed, when we marry Flash, Ajax and server-side scripting we can start to really achieve great results. Google can index dynamic text and content passed through XML etc, and with new innovations like Asual’s SWFAddress allowing SEO friendly URL’s to navigate Flash, as well as adding the ever so important Back button functionality often missing in Flash sites.

Whilst the battle of SEO vs Flash continues, I predict that it will not be long before we can have our cake and eat it…

Max McKeown (e-Strategist) describes brochure site as being like “inviting people into a group discussion to learn about their issues, then getting up and leaving the room, without leaving any recording devices.” A well tracked website can improve your reporting on your website and any other viral campaigns you set up, you will be able to tell the right time to send or post a campaign on the site, you will understand which pages you need to focus on and which pages you need to delete. You can basically determine the content of your website using this.

Does this mean the death of a plain Brochure site? Or just the evolution of client and service-providers interaction and understanding the needs of the client? Next time you set up a website for plain aesthetic qualities please note that, your competition is constantly hunting your clients and probably using better weapons than you.

Before I give you the actual content of this post, allow me to say that it is increasingly becoming clear that Google wants to provide valuable information to website owners and webmasters to inrease site rank in the SERP’s.

This may or may not be a follow-up on my previous blog post about Google providing tips for improved site rank, but however we see it, it also raises a further point for discussion.

Google’s primary focus has always been to provide accurate and relevant results to any keyword-related search in Google. I belive this is, and will remain, Google’s aim.

This was confirmed – kind of – by Stafford Masie, Google South Africa’s Country Manager, in a recent Google presentation. Stafford commented on the Quality Score of landing pages which really relates to PPC, but I believe this is just as important for improving your site rank through SEO.

He mentioned 4 points that makes up Quality Score but i want to highlight just two:

• The quality of your content
• The moment of relevance

These two points is exactly what Google wants to deliver in search engine result pages and to me, this confirms that Globally, Google is giving away tips not because they’re nice, but because they want to deliver relevant results in the SERP’s. Results that provide quality content at the right time.

Therefore, we need to make sure that our websites contain quality content that is not only relevant, but which is helpful to our site visitors. We need to provide relevant, quality content at the right time.

Webmasters and website owners should take note of this. This should be your aim when designing your website.

To do this it is best to follow the basic principles of SEO and thanks to Google’s contribution, here are the tips from the blog post which is sure to help you.

1. Correct Site Structure
   • Organize site pages with a clear hierarchy and internal links for good navigation. This means structuring your website into major categories, with suitable sub-pages and subcategories under each. Google also recommend using a sitemap.
   • Use Google Webmaster Tools. These are a free set of tools that are easy to use and can give you information on who links to your site and which queries people are using to find your web pages.
   • Give your pages titles which are relevant – avoid titles such as “Welcome to my site” or “homepage”.
2. Inbound and Outbound Links
   • Think about the quality of your incoming links. To increase the popularity of your site, aim to acquire links from other sites with common themes.
   • The outgoing (external) links from your site also play a role in determining your ranking. When adding a link, ask yourself, “Will this link be useful to my visitors?” or “Will my visitors click this link?”. Do not participate in link exchange networks that go against the Google quality guidelines and they will have a negative impact on your ranking.
3. Content Creation
   • It is important to add original content to your site on a regular basis for many different reasons:
     • It will encourage visitors to return to your site often
     • It will encourage the Google robots to go back to your homepage regularly and attract more links from other sites.
   • Think long term. Keep adding original content with a clear structure between your pages for the best results.

Source: Google Reveals Major Elements Of Their Ranking Algorithm