Redswish - carefully crafted banter

What is the purpose of your site?

Here’s one of those ‘less talk, more listen’ posts. You don’t get many from me! I want to know a bit about your websites and your approach and attitude towards their purpose. Is your site(s) designed to make money, inform and educate, publicise a product/service/person or is the purpose unclear – perhaps it’s just for fun. For each case, how do you achieve your goals?

Design and Usability

How does your site design contribute to the end goal? With regards to user experience, what do you feel takes priority – enabling visitors to get to where they need to be as quickly as possible, or to provide an enjoyable experience. Or both? And how do you go about achieving this?

How much do you feel design contributes towards the overall user experience? Would you prefer a site that is easy to navigate and view, with well written copy and clear structure but features a minimal or unattractive design? Or would you rather a beautiful looking site with fancy dynamic functionality and gimmicks, but ‘makes you think’ a more? What about a balance of the two. How do you feel you can work to create a website that is fantastically well structured and presented, whilst revealing some tasty eye-candy?

Measuring success

How do you measure your site’s success? What do you determine to be ‘success‘? Site traffic? Perhaps a deeper look at your site’s analytis; what do you feel takes precedence? Length of visit, repeat visits, countires visited from, pure volume of traffic? How do these statistics vary depending on your site’s purpose? Perhaps you feel the best measure of your site’s success is more organic than statistical – the comments you receive, RSS or email subscribers, contact form feedback or a combination of the lot.

What do you feel is more important; your visitors experience or the site stats and revenue made?

I want your opinions

Please take the time out to comment below. This post isn’t about me or Redswish, I want to know what other people think. Get your site URL in there to get some coverage. I’ll be summing up everyone’s responses in an article in a few weeks.

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10 SEO elements all websites should have

As I’m on holiday this week, tripping around Europe, I’ve little time to be writing blog articles. But fear not! Jerry Low has kindly stepped in to supply his top 10 SEO elements that all websites should have. Enjoy!

Seriously, you don’t need an expert to optimize your website for better search engine rankings. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), after all, is not rocket science. It is something you can learn and do it yourself – all it takes is some serious readings and hard work.

However, there is something we need to know before we start any real SEO work – the direction of our entire SEO campaign – What we are trying to achieve? What are our targeted keywords? Who are our competitors? That led us to the most important preparation work before any SEO campaign get started – keyword research.

Keyword research is crucial as it acts like a compass for your website or blog. A proper keyword research reveals the supply and demand trends in your industries thus giving general idea on which keyword you should focus on.

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Increasing and maintaining blog traffic

Content is King

Without a doubt the most essential method of both bringing in and retaining high levels of traffic is through constant generation of high quality, unique content. Regardless of whatever search techniques are used to generate visitors to your site, if they’re not greeted by useful information and interesting articles they will leave and most probably not return.

It’s all too easy to take a step back and go to another site in a few mouse clicks, so it’s essential that you provide a service or a level of quality that keeps visitors at your site, and ensures their return. Blogs are one of the most dedicated methods of bringing in traffic, but the real aim is to retain visitors, obtain repeat custom, subscribers, recommendations, inbound links and build up a community where your site’s visitors are engaged and compelled to provide their own input.

Blog posts are unlike other forms of written literature. Web users scan pages, so it’s important that the useful points are easy to find. Keep paragraphs short, use bullet points and lists, blockquotes, close-captioning and other visual techniques to keep your copy interesting. Large blocks of boring copy will not get read.

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Is Cuil all that cool?

Cuil is a new search engine service set to rival Google, ironically created by a group of previous Google employees. The search service, pronounced ‘cool’, claims to index over 120 billion pages (which if I may say so myself, is a staggering amount). Various sources reckon this is almost 3 times as much as Google, however Google state otherwise, although not revealing any actual statistics.

Cuil approaches search slightly differently from Google. Firstly, search results are displayed in a magazine format as opposed to a list. But their real USP is that they don’t collect user data as Google does. This could be a point that sways many people, especially in light of the recent focus on the amount and methods Google use to gather data on it’s users.

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Google Pagerank finally updating!

Get on the edge of your seats people! Matt Cutt’s announced on Thursday that the latest Google Pagerank updates will become visible ’sometime over the next few days’.
Well I’m waiting… ‘anxiously’!

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Large Blog Site Navigation

With my ever-growing fondness of blogging, I’ve wrote an article for the Flame blog on the subject of Navigating Large Blogs.
Here’s a quick excerpt:
So when a blog grows and expands, it’s easy for older posts to get lost and unseen. Sure they’re still there, archived or categorized, but once your post count starts to rise [...]

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Google looking at more social approaches to searching

In the attempt to continuously improve their already dominant powerful search service, Google are now looking at more social approaches to the way results are displayed and utilised by browsers.
A video from Tech Crunch shows a user interface being tested, demonstrating new features Google are looking to integrate into their search including the ability to [...]

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Google x-rays Flash

On the subject of Google’s announcement on their new greater ability to index Flash, I decided to have a little (informative) rant on the company blog. As the subject is of relative importance within the web design world, I also wanted to feature it on Redswish but for the sake of repeating myself – I [...]

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Just Ignore Pagerank

I used to be obsessed with Google Pagerank – constantly checking my sites to see if they’ve been upgraded, using SEO tools to analyse predicted future Pageranks and researching how long it had been since the last update and when we were due for the next.
But how reliable is Pagerank really? Please excuse my language [...]

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How Do You Judge a Website?

Many people will disagree with me I’m sure, but I’ve always thought that web design is an art. Seriously, apart from the aesthetic design side – I also feel that the technical coding and functionality of websites, and the process of combining and integrating this into the design is an artistic process in itself.
Oh how [...]

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