While some of these things fall into what I would call basic design practices that should always be done, others are what I think of as the little extra touches the designer can do to make a website that much better.

No matter what you call them, what everything on this list has in common is that they’re extra value that clients are receiving for their financial investment. It’s something that I communicate to them when giving a cost estimate for their project because it shows both how I’ll be spending the time and what they’re getting for what they’re paying.

See how many of these things you do when working on a website for a client – and if you’re not doing them, consider adding them to your regular design process.

Design and Navigation

• Create an error page – You may have checked every single link on your website, but it’s still inevitable that some visitors will type a URL wrong or somehow get to a page that doesn’t exist. A custom 404 error page will help your users find what they’re looking for when that happens.
• Add a favicon – Favicons are the little icons that you see at the top of a browser window and in your bookmarks list. They’re a great finishing touch for any website to have, and can even have some small usability benefits – great reasons for why websites should always use favicons.
• Validate the site markup – Make sure your website adheres to web standards before you launch. Validated websites load faster, better, and on more web browsers, and are also “future proof” in the sense that all web browsers will handle the website as you designed it.
• Cross-browser test – Your website should look and functions the same in all of the major web browsers and on all of the popular operating systems. Most of the popular cross-browser testing tools, such as Browser Shots, also test your website in various screen resolutions as well.

Server Optimization

• Resize images accordingly - If you’re calling an image from the server and the image files is really large even though it’s being displayed much smaller, resizing ahead of time will speed up the load time of that page, and help keep the amount of server space you’re using up at a minimum.
• Put javascript in the footer – If you’re calling external Javascript within your website, putting them in the header means that the server will try to load them first before loading your content. Putting them in the footer loads the content first before fetching the script – much more desirable.
• Clean up server of working files – While developing a website, I often find myself with extra files on the server that I had used at some point but am not using any longer. I delete those unnecessary files so that what’s on the server is only what’s being used somewhere on the website.

Search Engine Optimization

• Generate a sitemap – Creating a sitemap is useful for your users as a navigation tool, but for the search engines perspective it will help them find new content on your website faster than by relying on their crawler to find it. This will help you get more of content noticed and more links followed.
• Submit URL to search engines – If you’re launching a new website, the search engines won’t know about it unless you tell them to come and crawl your website. This one of the simple steps to bolster SEO on your website, so at a minimum submit the URL to Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
• Create a robots.txt file – This file tells the search engine spiders what they can and can’t crawl on your website. If you don’t want them to look at certain directories, this is where you would specify that. One way this might be useful for SEO is as a way to avoid duplicate content on your website.

Content

• Proofread your content one last time – There’s no excuse for spelling or grammar mistakes on a website. If you’ve written content for a website, such as links, intro text, etc., having extra eyes looking at it to make sure everything sounds good and is written properly will make sure any errors are caught.
• Check for broken links one last time – You can spend all the time in the world making your website as great as possible, but if you have broken links on it, the website looks bad. Before you launch, click through all the links on the website to verify that everything works properly.
• Set up Google analytics – Understanding what content your visitors are looking at on your website is absolutely essential in order to make it as effective as possible. Google Analytics is not only free, but incredibly popular and easy to use, which is why I use it on all my client websites.

Thoughts?

Is there anything that I didn’t list here that your normally do when you launch a new website for a client? Share your thoughts with everyone by leaving a comment below!

In the year or so that I’ve been in business for myself, I’ve continually looked to improve both my design abilities and how I communicate to potential clients the ways that my knowledge can benefit them. I’ve been making great progress on both fronts, but I’d really like to thank you especially, because it wasn’t until I saw your work that I became totally confident in my abilities in both areas.

A few months ago I approached the dental practice I go to with some thoughts I had about improving their website through a redesign. Their website at the time was in pretty rough shape and badly in need of improvement. The main dentist there told me that they had just contracted with you for the project, since you specialize in websites for dental practices. I wished him the best of luck on the project, and said that I looked forward to seeing their new website when it was ready.

I was thinking about that conversation this weekend. Since it had taken place 3-4 months ago, I figured that the new website would be launched by now. I did a quick Google search and confirmed that I was right – it had indeed been launched.

See, I specialize in creating custom websites for my clients that not only look great, but are also highly functional from both a usability and an SEO perspective. I like to talk to my clients and get a sense of who they are and what they need before I build them a website. I don’t think those are high standards to meet, and I thought that most other web designers shared a commitment to those ideas as well. But as I learned from seeing your work, that’s not always the case.

For a small business like this dental practice, the website that you gave them doesn’t truly meet their needs. I really believe that a redesign should be a big improvement over what it is replacing, but in this instance, I would even go so far as to say that it is a step backwards from their previous website.

Some of the things you did really stuck with me – in particular:

• Not taking advantage of their former #1 Google ranking for “dentist Chicago” - I’m sure you already know how difficult it is to optimize a website for generic keywords and have good results with them. Their previous website already already did that for them, even if those benefits weren’t intentional or they didn’t know how or why that was happening. Now, when you do a search for those terms, their practice isn’t anywhere near the first results page anymore.
• Not using their existing URL – For some reason the new website was created at a separate URL than the old one – www.their-website-url.com instead of www.theirwebsiteurl.com. But both URLs are still appearing in Google search results, so it will make people wonder which website is accurate. If I were some random person searching for a dentist and had to think about the difference between the two, you can bet I would just keep searching rather than stick around to find out the answer.
• Not creating a custom design - It’s very obvious after a few clicks through the website that the design is based on a template. That’s fine I suppose, although it’s not something I would personally choose to do for a client. On top of that, there are a lot of basic things that just look sloppy – such as the alignment on your list items, for example. Sloppiness can give people the impression that the business is unprofessional – which is probably not what they want to convey.
• Not understanding the role that colors have on a website - This particular dental practice markets itself as a dental spa. What that means, I’m still not quite sure, even though I’ve been going there for almost 4 years; I just know they offer a free shoulder massage after I get my teeth cleaned. But in any case, for a business that markets itself as such, I would have chosen colors that were much more reflective of what they are all about – perhaps colors that convey a sense of relaxation and ease, such as light blues and greens. I’m afraid that the dark purple and grey combination that you gave them just doesn’t give off that vibe.
• Not styling your links so it’s obvious what is a link and what isn’t - Website users associate blue words as links, so the way you styled words for emphasis in the headers and content gives the impression that those words are links, even if they aren’t. If you would have chosen another color for emphasis and used blue for your links instead of the dark red you used instead, it would have gone a long way towards making the text links as usable as possible.
• Not making it easy to find their address - You put “Northside of Chicago” in the top right area of the header, which is valuable real estate on a website. As a visitor, it’s good to have of where the practice is located in the city – but since the north side is somewhat/sort of a big area, it would have been more useful if you told me their address in that spot instead. Instead, you put the address in a place that’s more difficult to find and where I have to scroll down to find it.
• Not making the home page useful – Their business offers some unique services, so it would be useful to visitors to tell them on the home page what exactly they offer that differentiates theirs from a regular dental office. You could have put links to those services that they get the most business from, for example. Filling one-third of the home page with a lifestyle graphic strikes me as unnecessary, especially if you could could convey those emotions through a better design and color scheme, as I mentioned above.
• Not making it easy to find what it is they do - The procedures and services offered at their practice is why they’re in the business in the first place, so you want people to know about these things in as many ways as possible on the website. Making a list out of the almost 40 different things that are offered and only making it available from within the sidebar of their procedures section just doesn’t cut it. Neither does not alphabetizing or sorting the list in any way either. Next time, perhaps organize those links by categories or some other way to make it much more user-friendly.

Still with me? Good, because I’d like to thank you for everything that you did, however poorly it was done.

Why would I want to thank you for all of these things that I would do differently? It’s quite simple actually. As a web designer who is still perfecting my craft, it’s often helpful to get a sense of what not to do on a website so that I know what to do when I design my own. And by looking at your work, you just gave me the perfect example of what not to design when designing a website for a client.

Call me an idealist, but I believe that when we, as web designers, work with clients, we have a responsibility to deliver more than just the product that they are paying us for. We have a responsibility to really work with them so that they understand two main things – how:

1. Having a great website can really help their business
2. The unique knowledge that we have is necessary to achieve those benefits

That is the value proposition for why clients hire you. I know it’s mine, and it’s also why I am so committed to good design, usability, and SEO. All three are vital to a successful website, and a successful website can be vital to their long-term success. It’s up to us to incorporate these three concepts and to do a good job at doing so. I don’t know about you, but if I ever delivered a website to a client like the one that you delivered, I would not be able to call myself a professional any longer.

For my own success, I truly believe that being able to communicate these two points to our clients – and doing so in terms that they understand – is what really convinces people to hire me and what will ultimately make me successful as a web designer.

I hope that you feel the same way, and that you take these comments constructively as a way to improve the product that you deliver on future projects.

Sincerely,

Addicott Web

P.S. Next time I’m at the dentist, I’m going to follow up with them about their new website, and am planning to present some of my suggestions to truly improve their website. I hope I can show them that they don’t necessarily need to hire a firm specializing in a particular niche market in order to have a great website. They just need someone who is committed to creating a website that reflects their purpose and is fashioned with good design, usability, and SEO in mind. That is what will really benefit their business in the long run.

Webmaster Tools

Google’s suite of webmaster tools can tell you all sorts of information relating to how Google indexes your website. You don’t have to insert any code on your website to enable these tools, but you do have to make sure that Google is looking at your website. (As soon as you log in to the webmaster tools, it will tell you whether it is, so if it’s not, you can submit the URL to have your website crawled.)

Some of the most noteworthy things you can do within these webmaster tools include:

• Submit a sitemap – Creating a sitemap is one of those basic SEO steps that I’ve written about in the past. Submitting your sitemap directly to Google, which you can do here, will help Google’s crawler find pages on your website that it might not find otherwise.
• See your rank in top search query results – You can see a list of what people typed into Google that somehow led them to your website, as well as the rank that your website appeared in the search results for that query. This can be useful in evaluating how successful you’ve been at optimizing your content around the keywords you chose.
• Generate a robots.txt file – The robots.txt file tells the search engine crawlers what to look at and what to ignore when they visit your website. If you don’t have one already, this tool can help you create and analyze your robots.txt file.

Google Analytics

Google’s analytics package help you analyze the traffic that your website receives. Unlike when you use the webmaster tools I mentioned above, here you have to embed some code onto your website in order for Google to receive data from your website, but there are step-by-step instructions provided for how to do this.

Once Google verifies that the tracking code is working and begins to import data, you can analyze your web traffic in a wide variety of different ways. From a web design perspective, here are some of the things you can see that I find most important:

• See your visitors’ browser capabilities – There is a lot of data that Google gathers from your website’s visitors, but these tools allow you to know many things such as their screen resolutions, screen colors, etc. One important tool that I find particularly useful lets you see which web browsers your visitors are using (Firefox, Internet Explorer, etc.). Why is that important? Different web browsers render websites differently, so knowing that the majority of your website’s visitors use one browser over another might save you time by eliminating the need for cross-browser testing.
• Know where the traffic is coming from – What websites are visitors finding your website through? Are there referring sites that are driving traffic to your website, or are the search engines the primary sources? Both will benefit you in the search engines, but significant numbers of the latter tell you that the SEO work you did on your website is paying off.

Other Google Tools to Use

Website Optimizer

Google’s website optimizer helps you test variations of different elements on your website, often from a usability perspective, to see which helps convert visitors the best. These changes can be small, like changing the size, color, or wording of an element on your website, but they can all have a big impact. Basically, this helps you make sure that your website is doing what it’s intended to.

Keyword Research Tool

Google’s keywords tool helps you research keyword and keyword variations to use when optimizing your website. You can analyze the keywords by search volume or by the competition for that keyword, both of which are important to consider when deciding which keywords you should incorporate in your SEO efforts.

Thoughts?

Now that you know more about Google’s free tools, if you don’t already use them, are you considering using them? Or if you already use them, what features or tools have you found particularly useful? Share with everyone by filling out the comment form below!

SEO is not just optimizing your website for Google; there are other popular search engines used as well. (Although as anyone in the SEO world will probably admit, that’s not really true – it really is all about Google.)

I focus on Google here because they are unique in the variety of tools that they offer to help optimize a website for their search engines, a lot of which I have personally used for some of my clients.

Tips for Website SEO

Create a sitemap.xml file

A sitemap.xml file is a listing of the pages on your website in a format that is friendly to the search engines. You might be more familiar with a site map that is intended for humans to use; it’s the same concept, but the XML format is in the language that the search engine crawlers read.

There are a variety of tools out there to generate site maps for your website:

• Static HTML website – If you have a website that is static HTML pages, then you can use the free sitemap generator at XML-Sitemaps.com to generate one.
• WordPress website – I recommend using a great plug-in that I found called Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress. It will generate and update a site map automatically for you.

Create a robots.txt file

A robots.txt file is a set of instructions that tells the visiting search engine crawlers what they can and can’t index on your website.

For example, you can give instructions to tell certain search engines not to crawl your website, or that all engines shouldn’t crawl a particular directory on your website. The most basic instructions tell all search engines that they can crawl all directories on your website.

When you subscribe to Google’s free Webmaster Tools, there is a tool that will create a robots.txt file for you. Once you create it, make sure that it goes in the root directory of your website.

Submit your URL

This one should be obvious, but it’s worth mentioning anyways. Submitting your URL to the search engines helps them find your website quicker – although sometimes it will still take some time after you submit it before the engines crawl your website.

At the bare minimum, you should submit your URL to the three major search engines. Here are the links for where you can do that:

• Submit a URL to Google
• Submit a URL to Yahoo
• Submit a URL to MSSN

Submit your sitemap

The same benefit as telling the search engines what your URL is applies to your sitemap as well – it will just help them find your website and content easier. From personal experience, Google makes it very easy to do – there is a tool within their webmaster tools that lets you do that.

Tips for Page SEO

Title tags

A page’s title tag is the first thing search engines look at when determining what a particular page is about. Title tags are also what potential visitors see and read when they’re looking at a search results page.

Most websites include the company name in the title tag, although there is still a good deal of debate about whether the name should be at the beginning or end of the title tag.

The most important thing to do with your title tags is make them relevant to what the page is about. It’s important to include one or two keywords in it as well, but don’t stuff your title tag full of keywords – that will just make your website look bad, and there are limits for the number of characters that can appear.

Header (H1, H2, H3…) tags

From the standpoints of usability, accessibility, and SEO, there are arguably fewer things that are more important than using your header tags properly. Not only do they visually break up your content on the page, but they also give users who are glancing through the page an idea of what is being written about.

How should header tags be used?

• H1 tags – Used for your main page title, to show what the page is about
• H2, H3, etc. tags – Used to break up your page copy, but also to show the search engines what the topics are on a page so that it can index your website properly

ALT and TITLE attributes

These two attributes don’t usually play a prominent role in the average user’s experience with a website, but they’re still important and shouldn’t be overlooked. There are also some small SEO benefits that can be gained from using them.

The ALT attribute is used when coding an image onto a page; think of it as some alternate text that appears should an image not load on a page. This attribute is important from an accessibility perspective because the screen readers used by blind people won’t show them what the image is, but if there is some descriptive text in the ALT attribute, they will pick up on that.

From an SEO perspective, the ALT attribute is another opportunity to get some code onto your page that the search engines will be able to read. Making it as relevant as possible to what the page is about can help contribute to stronger search engine rankings.

The TITLE attribute is usually used on links, and is often one of the small touches that a great website has. You’ve all seen the TITLE attribute in action even if you don’t realize what it is; if you hover over a link and a little tool tip appears, that’s the TITLE attribute in action.

From an SEO perspective, it’s again all about relevance, so be sure that what you’re putting in the TITLE attribute relates to where the link takes someone. Doing so will also help from a usability standpoint, which is just another added bonus.

Use META tags

Contained within the header of every page’s source code are what are called META tags. They are invisible to a website’s visitors, but are there because search engine spiders read them.

The two META tags that you need to concern yourself with the most when it comes to SEO are the description and keyword tags.

• The description tag is especially important because it is listed in your search result – it’s what users read when a link comes up and what makes them decide whether to click on the link or not. A well-written description should read like a sentence and should be a succinct summary of the page and what someone can find when on it. You don’t want to include as many keywords as possible, but be sure to write the description with a focus on the keywords that are relevant to that page.
• The keyword tag is still worth focusing some attention on, so be sure that you include at least a few relevant keywords in there – but again, don’t go overboard. Back in the early days of search, people used to stuff the keyword tags with anything and everything to improve their search engine results, and as a result, many search engines now just disregard the keyword tag.

Content is king

Want to know the most important aspect of SEO on a website? It’s the content. It always has been, and it always will be. You could use all of the tips mentioned above, but unless they are all relevant to the content on the page, then you’re just wasting time.

Yes, it’s true that most people will not read your content – but that doesn’t mean you should ignore it, because the search engine crawlers do read it and weigh it highly in their algorithms. The tricky part is that you also can’t write content that is entirely for the search engines, because real people need to read it and make a connection to it. There needs to be a balance between the two.

Here are some tips to help you write SEO-friendly content:

• Focus the content around a few keywords only – don’t try to include as many as possible
• Make sure that it reads well and makes sense from a human point of view
• Just write naturally and explain the information in terms most people will understand
• Keep it relevant to what people would expect to read on that page

SEO-practitioners often forget that the search engines are not the end unto themselves – they are only a tool that real people use to help them find what they’re looking for. So even if they can get the search engines to think that a page is great, it’s only as great as its ability to either keep people on the website, or to get them to make a purchase or complete a transaction of some sorts.

And in an interesting twist, yet another thing that the search engines factor into their algorithms is how quickly someone leaves your website from the search engine results that brought them there. This is just further proof that SEO can be summed up in one word, which I’ve already used repeatedly: relevance.

Thoughts?

These are some of the simpler steps that you can easily incorporate on your website. There are a lot more out there, so fill out the comment form below to share your best SEO tips, tricks, and tools with everyone!

Please only share SEO techniques that are considered “white hat” or ethical – no “black hat” or unethical tactics that can backfire and get you banned from the search engines. Thanks!

But did you know that there is a whole lot more that Google can do other than just searching for words? There are a ton of neat tricks out there that people have discovered, some of which I’ve compiled here. Try some of them, and see if you’re able to Google more efficiently.

Tips and Tricks

Track Packages

You can track your UPS, Fedex, and USPS packages without having to visit their respective website – just input the tracking number in the search field.

Get the Local Weather

If you don’t want to wait for the weather on the 8′s on the Weather Channel, and don’t want to navigate through your local newspaper/TV station website, simply type weather “your ZIP code” in the search box.

Product Reviews

Do want to find consumer reviews for a product that you’re interested in buying, but you don’t want to be taken to websites that are trying to sell you those same products? Try typing “product name” sucks into the search field to get more accurate reviews.

What Time Is It?

Want to know the time anywhere else in the world? Simply type in time “city” and it should display the current time in that part of the world.

Movie Times

Want to go see a movie, but you don’t have the local paper in front of you to find out when it’s playing? Type in “movie title” “your zip code”.

Use as a Calculator

You can use Google as a calculator to answer anything from the simplest math to the most complex equation.

When entering your math, + is used to add terms, – to subtract terms, * to multiply terms, and / to divide terms. Besides these basic operators, you can use ^ to work out something to the power of something (for example, “2^4” would be 2 to the power of 4), and “sqrt” to calculate the square root of a number (for example, “sqrt 4” would be the square root of 4).

Track a Flight

Don’t want to go to your airline’s website to find out when your flight is departing or someone’s flight is arriving? Then just type in “airline” flight “flight number” and get back the arrival and departure times right inside Google’s search results.

Convert Currency, Metrics, and more

Google’s powerful built-in converter calculator can help you out whether you’re cooking dinner, traveling abroad, or more. Find out how many teaspoons are in a quarter cup (type in “quarter cup in teaspoons”) or how many seconds there are in a year (type in “seconds in a year”) or how many euros there are to five dollars (type in “5 USD in Euro”).

Dictionary Definitions

By typing in “define” before a word, Google will display a list of dictionary definitions for that word.

Other Tips

• Phrase the question you are typing in the search engine in the form of an answer. For example: Instead of typing in, “What is the average rainfall in Chicago?” you might want to try typing, “The average rainfall in Chicago is”
• Place quotes around phrases that must be searched together. For example: If you put quotes around the words, “baseball hat” Google won’t waste your time by looking for Web pages with the words “baseball” and “hat”.
• Google is a global White Pages and Yellow Pages. Type in phonebook “business name” “city, state”, and Google will automatically display the address and phone number.

Suggest Your Own

Have tricks for using Google that you think others would find useful? Share with everyone by commenting below!

We thought we had found a humane society to go to, so we tried getting in touch with them to get a few initial questions answered. The phone number (which is prominently displayed on their website) went unanswered, and despite numerous attempts to reach them, we were never able to get through to someone.

So instead we decided to take a drive to the address we found listed – not on their website, but on the search results page. We piled into the car, eager to see some dogs and excited about seeing the look on our mother’s face when we brought a dog in the door.

Unfortunately, once we arrived at that address, it turned out to be not the animal shelter that we were looking for, but someone’s home.

Now, you would think that an animal shelter – whose sole purpose is to place animals in good homes – would make it easy to actually find them. But by not having accurate contact information on their website, the way they communicated was at odds with their mission.

So what are the lessons here that can be applied to creating good websites?

• Search results can only be as good as the information on your website
• An up-to-date website is essential to your communications strategy
• Contact information should always be available and, more importantly, accurate
• If you depend on people finding you, then make it as easy as possible for them to do so