1. Easy to use admin interface: this is critical, for a web publishing platform to be successful it has to empower the website administrator, making it easy to add and maintain content quickly and easily.
2. Extensibility: the system should be able to add new functionality and features as needed, relatively inexpensively and quickly.
3. Easy to use templates: the look and feel of the site needs to be easily customized, so the tempting engine should be easy to work with.

I recommended Drupal for awhile and used it on a number of websites and it works pretty good. But I found that adding functionality to Drupal beyond what it was designed to do out of the box, was quite difficult. Also, the Drupal admin interface was difficult for some people to come to grips with.

For the past year or so I have been using WordPress with fantastic success. WordPress makes it so easy to keep a website up to date that people are more likely to add new content. The admin interface is very simple and easy, I have no reservations about introducing the most computer illiterate users to the WordPress admin interface, it’s that easy. Additional functionality can be easily added to a WordPress site and I have been able to quickly and easily customize a website’s look and feel because the templating system is very easy to work with.

The number one thing you can do to make a website more successful is to add more content. More content means more things for people to look at and read, more reasons for people to link to your site, more pages for search engines to index and link to, more reasons people to return to your site. So an easy to use web publishing platform encourages more and better content by making it very easy to add and edit content.

Call and talk with me about making your web site more successful by adding WordPress.

• Capture visitor’s attention: Your home page is like the cover of a book, it has to grab attention and encourage people to explore deeper. Your usual “Welcome to our site” copy is not enough, you have a very brief period of time to make this impression, it must be made graphically or lots of people will leave before they have time to read anything. Balance is required in the area of home page graphics, balance between eye-catching images and download time since a fast loading home page is also important. This does not mean that your home page should be all images and no text, it needs to have both, images to catch people’s eyes, text to explain what you’re all about and for the search engines to index since they can’t read images.
• Direct visitors to the content they want: The home page is not just the cover of the book, it also needs to be the table of content. The best way I know of to get web visitors to leave your site is to make it difficult for them to find what they are looking for. The days of the Flash intro page are long gone, visitors expect to see the global site navigation on the first page of your site. The site navigation should be obvious, simple and intuitive, give them that and they may stay around long enough for you to tell your story.
• Establish the credentials of your business or organization: While grabbing visitor’s attention and helping them find what they are looking for is important, it all means very little if your website leaves the impression that your 12 made it during summer vacation. The professional image of your website is as important as that of your office and your dress. Visitors form opinions about your company based on the image portrayed by your website, make sure that is as polished and professional an image as you can offer.

Creating a successful home page requires a delicate balance of all three of the above items. If your website’s home page is able to grab peoples attention, make the content of your website easily accessible while portraying a professional image you are sure to reap the benefits.

If you have any doubts about your current website’s home page, we would be glad to talk with you about it to offer our professional advice or a bid on what it would cost to improve.

• Look good - This goes without saying and is the part you probably already knew. A good looking website portrays a positive image for the business it represents.
• Work on a wide variety of the most popular browsers and operating systems - Every web browser will render a page slightly different, there are also mobile phones, video game consoles and other odd platforms to think about.
• Be easy to navigate - the end user must find the site easy to get around in and not confusing or they will go to the competition.
• Achieve it’s goals - Whatever the site was intended to do, be that getting potential clients to call or producing online sales, the site needs to be designed to naturally interest visitors and funnel them towards that goal.
• Play nice with search engines - Almost any site will benefit by better search engine ranking. So another thing the website must do is make it easy for the search engine spiders to index the content of that site.
• Be easily maintainable - At some point every site will need updates, a well put together site will be created with updates in mind using includes, comments in the code and clean, easily readable HTML.
• Load quickly - Obviously, yet it is often not made a priority in web design.

There are many other things a website needs to do, but these are the big ones in my opinion. These are the items that separate the men from the boys in web development, the lowest bidder is most likely not going to nail these points. Likewise a person trained in traditional graphic design will not have all the skills necessary to create a great website, it takes someone who understands the intricacy of website design, someone who understands things like:

• graphic design
• cross-browser and cross-platform website compatibility
• information architecture and web usability principles
• search engine optimization techniques
• W3C HTML standards
• server side scripting languages
• image optimization

A really great website has to look good, work across all browsers and platforms, be easy to navigate, achieve it’s goals, be fully indexable by search engines, be easy to maintain and load quickly, among other things. Creating a website that can do all these things requires a wide variety of skills that you won’t find at every business offering web design services.

Our ideal candidate will be a designer with knowledge of current design genres, web design techniques, layout and usability, comprehensive understanding of standards compliant HTML and CSS, ability to create and optimize graphics for maximum visual impact and minimal download time as well as some understanding of client and server-side scripting. Ability and desire to learn is a must.

Qualifying for this position relies almost entirely on examples of your work and applied experience (whether professional, freelance, school or hobby). Don’t worry about the size of your portfolio it’s quality that counts. Provide examples of your work along with how it could apply to this position.

If you want to work at a dynamic, growing web firm, on high-profile and cutting edge ideas while avoiding bureaucracy and mind-numbing meetings, this is the place for you.

Email your resume, salary expectations and examples of your work to Liquid.

Because We Care A Lot deals with individuals with disabilities it was very important that this new web site be accessible to everyone and meet the criteria of Section 508 Amendment to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Section 508 was enacted to eliminate barriers in information technology, to make available new opportunities for people with disabilities, and to encourage development of technologies that will help achieve these goals. We Care A Lot contracted Redding based Liquid Design to develop the site and ensure it meets Section 508 and current HTML standards.

The website can be viewed at www.wecarealot.org.

The website of the Shasta Cascade Wonderland Association at www.shastacascade.org, was launched in 1995. In the course of over 12 years this site has received millions of visitors from all over the world but the design remained relatively unchanged… until now. Their new website launched last week and it is a major upgrade that will no doubt benefit the organization and the entire Shasta Cascade Region as it encourages more visitors to this area.

The new ShastaCascade.org features, sections on every conceivable attraction and activity from golf to shopping to camping and everything in between. With easy, intuitive navigation and great looking design this new site will better represent the region and encourage visitors to explore more.

The new web design is the result of Liquid New Media. Liquid was tasked with capturing the beauty and excitement of this part of California in a website while keeping download times to a minimum and making sure it was viewable across the range of web browsers and operating systems.

Visit the new site at www.ShastaCascade.org

• Is your web designer offering you a custom design?

  Some web designers charge you like you’re getting a custom web design, then give you a template. There is a huge difference in price, if you are getting a template design the price should reflect that.

• Does your web designer create web standards compliant code?

  Designing your website to meet current web standards ensures that your site not only looks good on current web browsers, but will most likely continue to look great on future web browsers too.

• Will your web designer’s code be search engine friendly?

  Not the same as search engine optimization, but in some ways more important. Search engine friendly code means your website is built in such a way that search engines are able to easily index your site and can determine what it’s about.

• Will your web designer stand behind the website for the long term?

  Like any piece of software, many problems with a website may not crop up until after you take delivery. Will your web designer continue to provide support for any code they wrote? For how long afterwards?

We would be happy to talk with you about these or any other web design related questions, free of charge. We never charge for consultations or just friendly conversation about our industry and what you should expect.

While there are many business offering search engine optimization, you need to be careful because some are offering substandard service, either they don’t really know what they’re doing and taking peoples money, or they are engaged in “black hat” methods, that is those techniques that are considered unethical and could result in a site being banned by search engines.

So what goes into effective “white hat” search engine optimization? It used to be about meta tags a few years back, hidden tags in the header section of a page’s HTML that told a search engine what that page was about. Thanks to people abusing meta tags, they are not used by most search engines today, you will still want to have them, but the big 3 (Google, Yahoo and MSN) will not use them to determine your rank. The most important thing you can do to improve your search engine rank today is to develop inbound links. An inbound link is a link to your website from another site not in your domain. The number of links to your site tell search engines how relevant your website is, the higher the PageRank of the site linking to you, the more that link counts for. There are a lot of other things that will improve your site’s standing in the search engines like using carefully researched keywords and the use of those keywords in the headings, subheadings, title and body of your page, still the most important thing is having lots of inbound links.

How do you go about getting inbound links? There are lots of places online where you can buy links, be careful if you choose this option that the website you are buying the link on has a decent PageRank itself, otherwise it may not be worth what you’re paying for it. There are also opportunities for reciprocal links (you link to me and I’ll link to you), but some search engines are now recognizing reciprocal links and giving them less weight when determining a website’s relevance. The best way to develop lots of good inbound links is still the old fashioned way, develop great content on your website that will make people want to visit your site and link to it.

At this point it’s obvious there’s quite a bit of time and/or money involved in getting a website search engine optimized, researching keywords, building those keywords into the content and the meta tags, developing inbound links, not to mention making sure the code is clean and properly formatted so the search engines will not have any trouble reading it. What can you expect to see for all this? First of all let’s make some assumptions about your website’s conversion rate. A conversion rate is the ratio of the number of visitors who take a desired action (fill out a form, make a purchase, etc.) to the number of visitors who view the page. The average conversion rate for many websites is around 4%, if your website sells widgets and has a conversion rate of 4% you will get 4 new customers for every 100 visitors to your website. I can see that the search term “widget” got 23,867 searches last month (September 2006), If you could get in the top ten results for that term and capture even a tenth of those searchers you would have 2,387 visitors a month which would result in 95 widget sales. Obviously the cost of search engine optimization is minimal compared to its potential to make money.

With these kinds of returns you can see why SEO is something that should not be an afterthought for a website but something that is built in right from the start.

1. Fresh Content - The most obvious reason is that your website will be easier to keep up to date. It just takes a minute to add new content, if it’s easy you’re more likely to do it and your website benefits by staying fresh.
2. Lots of functionality is available to you at little cost. There are hundreds of free modules available that plug into existing content management systems adding complex programming features with very little effort. Meaning that the cost of adding certain features to your site drops significantly. Some of the modules available include:
   • Site search
   • Polls
   • Password secured content
   • Email newsletters
   • Blog
   • Discussion forums
   • Photo galleries
   • Much more.
3. Dynamic categories, not only can you add new pages easily, but new categories can be added and the site navigation will expand gracefully to match.
4. Extensibility, new modules are being written all the time and since modules are developed in common languages like PHP, almost anything can be custom tailored to work within the system.
5. User friendly interface, the technical features of a CMS may tend to intimidate, but fear not, the interface is user friendly and easy to learn. So while the your CMS may have lots of technical features available, your interface for adding new content is user friendly and easy to learn

The content management system used to be practical only for large companies, but with lower costs to implement and the advantages listed above any website can benefit and see a quick return on the investment. Contact Liquid Design for a free quote on a content management system and see how affordable it can be to add these advantages to your website.