Future Proof Website Design
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) oversees internet coding standards and for those of you who have websites that had to be quickly changed when Internet Explorer 7 was launched, you will understand the need to ensure your website will comply with changing standards and developments in the near future.
W3C valid website coding is future proofing your website and protect your investment in online marketing. Using Clean coding that complies with the projected developments on the web will not only help future proof you from the need to invest in costly changes in coding, but also will help your site to be search engine friendly.
SEO Techniques
How much traffic your website attracts is very strongly linked to how high you appear on search engine listings. Most surfers do not look past the first page of results so it is vital that every effort is made to make the job of searching for your site and making it relevant are taken. Good coding for your website will go a long way to achieving this by ensuring accessibility for categorizing the site by search engines but at the same time, making your site look great for human visitors when they do visit the site.
A major development that clean coding will address is the mobile revolution as users increasingly adopt handheld devices to access the internet for information. Cell phones are an obvious example, along with PDA’s and Blackberries however the screen size presents obvious challenges to how the site is presented to the user. Clean coding can help your website be presented in a convenient format for users who will frequently ignore anything on the web that does not meet their own standards of ease of use and presentation.
Clean Code Design
Investing in a website using clean code will not completely remove the risk of complying with developments in the future but it will go a long way to ensuring that you don’t have to as well as increasing your online exposure.
Future Proof SEO
Having a great looking website is only a part of the process in generating business using the internet. Many website owners adopt the attitude that they have built it s visitors will come but soon realize this is very wrong!
Just as with any advertising, you need to place your website where it will get the most exposure for your target market. Think about a billboard stuck out in the middle of the desert – who is going to see it? It would be a complete waste of time and money. Your website needs to be promoted and using a mixture of search engine and social media techniques, traffic will be generated which in turn will produce business opportunities.
Future Proofing Websites Design
Promoting your website is covered in our SEO sections, but there is also the need to ensure that your website is always available whenever a user clicks on the site from search results. We all have had the experience of finding an interesting looking site on a search engine only to find a dead link when we go to visit. Your hosting provider must be able to provide a very high standard of uptime so users can access it 24/7 whenever they wish.
SEO Future Proofing Web Design
Online users are very fickle and extremely impatient. If they do not get what they want, when they want and how they want – they go somewhere else, fast! You need to ensure several things take place smoothly whenever a user comes to your site. First, that pages load quickly as a user will not hang around with a slow loading site; many websites that use slow loading video on the homepage simply result in a visitor giving up on the site rather than waiting a few seconds. Second, the presentation of the site needs to have that “Wow” factor so a visitor is immediately hooked – think of the newspaper editor’s maxim. A headline is nothing more than a way to get a reader to read the first line of the article!” Your site must be interesting and relevant to what the visitor is looking for or you will lose them very quickly.
