Best web design is a combination of quality content, quality maintenance, and quality web hosting.
There are many web designers. There are professional companies and many freelancers that offer web design. However, from our perspective, most do an insufficient job for their clients. Some underperform intentionally to reduce the time spent designing a website properly. Some do it out of a lack of knowledge without knowing they are hurting their customers rather than helping them.
Web design is not complicated, but the truth is that most do not correctly understand how to create a “search engine-friendly” website. Almost every business that makes a website does this to increase business or inform customers or shareholders about their business activities.
Some of the most common mistakes in web design are:
- An excessive amount of graphics
- Lack of relevant content
- Fail to submit or properly submit website URL to the major search engines
- Most that submit website URLs to search engines fail to submit the XML sitemap
- Failure to produce links to website URL
Most website owners want to build and launch a website, thinking that the task is over when the project has just begun. However, once a website is created, launched, and correctly submitted to major search engines like Google and Bing, routine maintenance needs to be done, and additional content through the use of the blog feature should be added to keep the search engine bots returning to the site to re-crawl the site.
Another essential task to own a successful website is good website hosting. No successful website is hosted on a shared web server. All high-ranking websites are hosted on a VPS or dedicated server and properly managed by a hosting expert. Hosting is a critical factor for web design and web hosting.
Important facts to consider when hiring a web designer:
- Ask questions; a lot of questions.
- Ask for their recommendation for web hosting.
- What are their professional training and accomplishments?
- Are they, graphics-based designers
- Do they help write content
- What is their opinion of content?
- What routine maintenance makes their offer
- Ask their opinion on SEO
- Do they offer SEO services or outsource them?
- Do they use webmaster tools?
You should know the answer to these questions to know if the web designer you interview is qualified for the task. A properly designed website will make a difference to any business. For example, to be found in Google local search results, you must verify your business address on Google Maps. This will enhance your local traffic being found in search and maps.
Website builders are typically not good for search engines. Having said that, they have improved them over recent years. The content management system (CMS) that is most flexible and best for rankings is WordPress. It has quickly grown into being the industry standard.
All websites need a sitemap that can be indexed by the search engines. A sitemap tells the search engines about all of your pages so they properly crawl and index all web pages and show them in search results, providing the offer of relevant content that is properly structured.
Blogs are effective marketing tools for many businesses.
If you use WordPress as the content management system (CMS), you can easily integrate blog pages/posts on your website. Blogs are a great way to communicate specials, employee changes and promotions, product announcements, press releases, new projects, and much more. It can and should be the epicenter of your company/corporate communications.
Blog posts must be informational, adding value to the website and company. Additionally, they should be written with sufficient content for the search engines to crawl and index the post. Typically, it is recommended that a post should be 250-300 words minimum with subtitles and use an SEO plugin to monitor changes that need to be made to ensure your post rank well in the search engines. Linking back to your own website is critically helpful because internal links are some of the most valuable links. We use and recommend Yoast SEO.
Videos and graphics will slow down your website load time. The search engines will pass on showing your website in search results if it loads slowly. Search engines’ objective is to create a positive user experience by showing the websites in search results that the web user is seeking. One of those factors is a fast load time. Websites with a slow load time have a significantly higher bounce rate. In other words, visitors do not stay on slow sites as much as they stay on fast websites. We have already stated the importance of quality web hosting, but we cannot stress web hosting.
To review important points of best web design:
- Quality and fast website hosting
- SEO plugin with an XML sitemap
- Unique, high-quality content that is sufficient for search engines to index
- Links are necessary—internal links as well as external links.
- Properly index the website and website XML sitemap.
For the best web design, make sure you hire a web designer qualified with references for successful websites—the owner of STL.News is STL.WebTech Group manages news, LLC, and the site. WebTech is a web host, design, and SEO firm that offers search engine-friendly websites.
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