If your website design looks like a 14-year old's MySpace page, you're gonna run into some trouble. Too often, online businesses will try to go over the top with backgrounds, graphics, splash pages and overly-designed sites. If you want your website to be effective, you gotta keep it simple.

Start With An Optimized Site Architecture

Before you start putting together a flashy design for your site, start with the fundamentals. Create a site architecture that allows you to optimize for specific keyword phrases. Your goal should always be to help users (and search engine spiders) track down relevant information in the clearest possible way.

Organize your top-level navigation bar with tabs that point to your most important content pages. Incorporate a left navigation that helps users find what they are looking for quickly. Once you've established a solid website architectural foundation, you can start sprucing up your design.

Flashy Splash Pages Do Nothing For SEO

If you've created an entire flash-based site or an intro splash page that animates images and text into a crazy multimedia presentation, you may be losing valuable opportunities to optimize your site properly. A little bit of flash design doesn't hurt, but if all of your content appears in an image-heavy flash presentation, your content won't get properly indexed by the search engine spiders. Your keyword-rich text will be lost if it appears as a flash image. An all-flash site won't have an optimized URL structure and you'll lose valuable interlinking opportunities. When it comes to using flash on your website, keep it simple and remember, less is always more.

Let The Content Speak For Itself

We live in world full of multimedia-rich outlets, but throwing up tons of graphics and images can detract from the real meat of your site -- the content. Your multimedia design elements should supplement your content, not vice versa. Well-written content that offers users the information they're searching for will always win out over flamboyant images and graphics.

So before you try to make your site look like an explosion of pictures, moving images, graphics and flash presentations, remember the basics. Create keyword-rich content that helps people and couch this content in a visually appealing, but not overly distracting design. Simplify the content finding process, and you'll get love from users and search engines alike.

 

--Chris Stout