Of course with website design you need to keep your customer in mind. Attractive sites bring people back. Eye candy is important. If you look at my coffee site you will see that it is attractive to the eye. It is also attractive to the search engines.
Offering lots of content is important. Did I mention CONTENT IS KING? Yea I think I did but you will hear me harp on it again and again as it is one of the MOST important things to search engine marketing. The more content in the form of text, alt tags and other html coding, the more important your page will rank (PR). For information about PR I like to use other software that is available to track PR, not only across Google, but other SE’s as well. We will get into this later.
So your design elements must incorporate not only Eye Candy for your customers but also a means for the SE’s to read your site. Many sites use a data base program to make the pages from information they put into the data base. A sample of this would be Harmony Cedar , their site runs on software on a computer server that offers up ever changing information. This site also runs on a Data base where my text and what I have highlighted or made a link to is stored and when your looking at a page it is what the data base is offering. Data base run sites can be cheap like this one, or very expensive like Harmony Cedar.
Most sites that I manage or create are made up of what we call static pages. These are pages of HTML code that once placed on the internet shows what you see when you click to a site and view it in your web browser. They are inexpensive to create, and maintain or make changes too.
Most people do not need to learn HTML code in order to open up a site. Depending on your site, your host etc.. you may get software that will help you create your site. You can use some Word Processing software to creat HTML pages from what you create in a word document. However the best form is to create the pages from scratch or using some sort of template which content the very basic elements needed.
The Basic elements of a webpage needed in a site is: CONTENT, A Menu, A Header, and a Footer. Almost every website page you look at contain thise 4 elements. Obviously the Header is at the top, the Footer is at the bottom, where the content is viewable and the menu’s are located is entirely up to you and your particular tastes, or better yet the tastes of your customers. Essentially you have 3 places where you can put your Menu, at the top of the page, along the left or along the right. No one puts their menu at the bottom, though in the footer we do put links to other pages that are important to have on every page.
There are other types of files which we will get into later that are also very helpful to a website, like a sitemap, robots file, and other things.
So now you know the basic design elements that are needed.