Site/Portal Development, Optimization and User Experience

Design Optimization – Produce Higher Rankings and provide a higher business value through a behaviorally designed user experience.

How does this work? 

The better the design, the more easily and thoroughly pages are spidered by the search engines, and the more comprehensive the search engine indexing.  By applying statistical and behavioral data to page and site flow designsyou produce a much better UX (User Experience)  and interaction for your visitors, which translates into more time on your site (stickiness)  and higher rates of return.  

I guess it makes sense though, if a hotel lobby were uncomfortable, unappealing, cluttered, noisy, abrasive and without the services or functions you came for – you’d leave too-right?   

For consistency and high quality designs pages are less frequently coded independently, rather they follow a set of common structures and rules set for the entire site. In most implementations these are referred to as Style Sheets, and the fact that the rules follow a hierarchical inheritance policy is what is referred to as Cascading inheritance.  That’s where CSS or Cascading Style Sheets comes from.

CSS driven websites have pages that are cleaner because of common structural rules and centralized resources (for example one image can be placed in a location and many pages use it), making the pages and the site easier to manage and maintain, make editorial changes and update.

Because the pages use common code, they are more “lightweight”, meaning there are less lines of code for a server to have to run or a browser to read and therefore are more quickly displayed with less use of computer power.   <yeah I know-but this isn’t written for you> The point is that by displaying quickly, it keeps the viewers attention on YOUR site and page content and off of someone elses. 
    
The other big benefit is that by using a common layout, a user can very quickly familiarize themselves and navigate around very quickly and easily – either a human or a machine.  If they get lost, there are always shortcuts to get back to the Home page where they can start over. 

In addition, appealing and consistent graphic design should be considered.  There are many very talented and qualified artists using some amazing tools.  If you pay attention to the rest of the visual senses your user will thank you.  Balance the intensity of the graphics against the performance needs however, because images tend to take more effort and might display more slowly. 

We have a team of User Experience and Design experts, and have some amazing relationships within the creative community.  In all fairness, we have to disclose that some members of our team have designed some of the and built largest brand name sites in the world, and have been involved with the underlying technology and the various diciplines of internet useability and site design for over 15 years.   We also partner with leading edge researchers and innovators in the studies of design and behavior on the web. 

 (See User Experience , Eye Mapping)