Every thing you need to know about designing your website from start to finish… Stage 3 (Part 2) – Construction

by Jill McMahon / Pretty Pollution

Today we explore Part 2 of the construction stage by going through ‘creating templates and pages’ and’ Basic SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) for your website’. Next month we will finish off the construction stage with an article on ‘adding functionality to your website using Business Catalyst’. If you haven’t read the previous articles in my series they can be found here.

Creating templates and pages
If you are unfamiliar with templates and pages I have explained them in detail in my third article. To recap, a template is a file with a pre-designed format and structure which is used to keep website content pages consistent and clear. A content page is an individual page on a website in which the content varies from page to page.

Templates
A small website will normally have one or two templates. For example the site www.mort.com.au has two templates – one for all pages and one for the blog. The differences between the two are shown below in Figure 1. As you can see the main template has two blue side panels and the Blog template does not. The blog template needed more space to allow for images and video to be inserted without pushing the side panels out of line.

Fig. 1 – Main Template and Blog Template. 

Pages
Each page on your site requires it’s own HTML document created. For example the Mort Financial site has 14 separate pages. Each button in the main tabbed menu has it’s own html page (Contact Us, About, Etc.) and so do the report buttons in the light blue panel on the right. After each page is created the correct template is applied to the page. The home page and blog page are shown below in colour and the template is grayed out.

Fig. 2 Home page content and blog page content

Basic SEO for your website (Search Engine Optimisation)
The definition of SEO from Wikipedia is:

“Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results.”

Now I am not an expert in SEO and will never claim to be. I find that SEO is the hardest thing to explain to my clients because of its complicated nature. The following paragraphs will explain the basic technical qualities your website should posses in order to be search engine friendly. If you want to truly understand Search Engine Optimisation and Search Engine Marketing I suggest you read Barbara Fischer’s articles on The Four Secrets of Successful PPC Campaigns Part One and Part Two, any of Joshua Hay’s articles on the BC Community Page or the entire Wikipedia article on Search Engine Optimisation.

Here is a quick run down of the basic characteristics a website should have in order to search engine friendly.

On Page Characteristics
On Page Characteristics refer to characteristics of your actual website and include:

• Keywords throughout your site – make sure you are writing your specific keywords throughout all the copy in your site. When writing your keywords to your copy you should consider keyword proximity, density and relevance.
• Page titles – This is referring to the name of each web page. Page titles show up on the top of the internet browser window and should be relevant to the content on the page. For example, in the Mort Financial site, a page that is about a Damaged Credit Report the page title is “Get a Loan With Damaged Credit” http://www.mort.com.au/Credit
• Page headings and tags – The page heading is the main heading on each page describing what the page is about. This should be relevant to the content on the page and also relate to the page title. Again using this page for an example http://www.mort.com.au/Credit you see that the main blue title is Get a Loan With Damaged Credit. In a technical sense you should make sure your main heading is using a H1 tag.
• Links – This refers to all the links on your site and what text they include. If you need to link text to another page on your site you should write a descriptive link, not just “click here.”  For example, on the Mort Financial site if you wanted to link to the Damaged Credit page you would create the link as “Click here for a report about How to Get a Loan With Damaged Credit”
• Image Names – This refers to the “alt” text you give images when inserting them into your site. The Alt text is basically a description of the image. This helps make your website accessible for people who have disabilities. For example the Damaged Credit button image would have an “alt” name of “Click here to sign up to the Damaged Credit Report”
• Meta Tags and Descriptions – This refers to the tags that are inserted into the Header section of your website. There are two main meta tags – Keyword and Description. In the keyword meta tag you would insert all the keywords relevant to your site. This includes words that prospective customers would type when using a search engine to find your website. The description meta tag is where you would enter a description of your site that shows up in a search engine when someone searches for your site. For example if you type in Mort Financial into google you will see that this description “Mort Financial provides professional advice on the most appropriate funding to those wishing to purchase or refinance residential or commercial real estate” shows up right underneath the link. That is the description we used in the description meta tag.
• Writing good content – This refers to all text you have on your site. The more great content, interesting articles, FAQ’s, stories, etc you have on your site the more people will want to read it. Having good content on your site also helps to rank your page higher in the search engines.
• Site Maps – A site map is a navigation tool for your website. It’s a page on your site that lists all the pages on your site in the correct hierarchy with a link to each page.

 Off Page Characteristics
Off Page Characteristics include characteristics that are not on your actual website such as:

• Links from other websites that link to you. When a search engine finds a link to your site from another site, it checks to see how relevant the link text is, the quality or page rank of the site that links to you and the keywords that are included in that site, and more.
• The quality or page rank of the sites that you are linking out to and what the link text says, etc.

…and Finally
Hopefully this month’s article has given you a greater understanding of how templates and pages work and has helped to explain basic SEO techniques. Next months article will showcase  “adding BC functionality to your website” and will highlight the benefits of all the BC features no website should be without.