CONTENTS
01. Setting Up a Web Site
02. Why Design for Search Engines?
03. Search Engines: How They Think
04. Your Communications Hub
05. Business Content
06. Self-Promotion Through Service to a Larger Community
07. Managing Contradictory Principles In Web Site Design
08. Navigation, Hierarchy & Structure
09. The Visual Image & Writing Style
10. Testing the Site

What's in a (Domain) Name?
Every company or individual should own their legal name if it's still available. If you own more than one name, several names can point to a single web site.
Tip: avoid names with characters that can be easily confused such as 0, O, and especially 1, l, I.

How Domain Names Work?
Your domain name (e.g., somecompany.com) is distributed over the Internet by a number of different organizations, but a registrar must be hired to manage your name and maintain your ownership of the domain name. The name can be moved from one registrar to another, but that can be problematic.

Hosting Your Domain
After your domain name has been registered, a hosting company is hired to make your web site available under your name on the Internet. Your site will be stored on and delivered from the hosting company's server system. Uploading to your hosting company's server requires that you get a password, user name and DNS address from the host.

e3motion can help you with all phases of choosing a name and setting up your site.

What new users are you trying to attract? OR Does your site exist to service and reassure existing customers?

Existing Customers
Even users who are familiar with your company and web site will occasionally use a search engine to go to your site. If your site appears high in the search index, users will come away from the experience with the impression that your company is competent and contemporary.

New Customers
Search engines are a powerful way to attract new users to your site and your message and to keep them aware of your offerings.

Constraints and Creativity
Developing a site to appeal to search engines gives the text and design consistency and focus. Search engines are not our masters, but understanding how they "think" provides a very useful set of constraints on creativity. An understanding of search engine index strategies empowers contributing employees and gives your team a common design standard. You can't think outside of the box unless you've got a box.

Longevity & Search Indexing
The day your site goes online is recorded in the WHOIS database. Search engines read this date and use it in weighing how early a site will appear in a search index. All other factors being equal, older sites score higher in search engine page rankings.

Search Terms: Describe Yourself, Describe Your Clients.
What would be the typical search terms that yourcompany.com would be associated with when a user is searching for a business like yours? What would those terms be in relation to: geography? Market? Audience? Service or product? Financial terms?

Importance of Word Order to Your Content
In what order will your users tend to use search terms?
Search engines index web pages that contain these search terms in the same order as the search.

Importance of Page Order to Your Content
In what order will your search engines tend to search pages on your site?
Search engines index web pages that contain search terms in the order that terms link from the home page. Search terms that appear on one site's home page will outrank terms that appear on the deeper pages of a second site. If content is critical to a search put it on the home page.

Lists and Scenarios
Are you in the business of solving problems?
A scenario of a real life problem and your solution provides a list of terms that will be used in a search by someone with that problem.

Redundancy, Metafiles & Verification
Is your designer talking metafiles?
Search engines compare the text of your metafiles to the text that is visible on the page. Every word in the metafile should appear in the text and in the same order. This comparison of text and metafile allows search engines to verify that the metafiles are legitimate search terms to be used in a search index or page ranking.

Incoming Links, Page Rankings and Google
e3motion will create links from e3motion.com to your site-- this creates a path for search engine "spiders" to follow and index your site. Spiders start at a few huge institutions' sites (such as government or IBM) and follow their links out across the Internet, indexing what they find....so if no one links to you, you're an island, isolated. Why link from e3motion.com? The e3motion art business has generated a lot of links from gov't sites that spiders follow to reach me and then my clients. Most web site service providers will also offer tools to promote your site by submitting directly to search engines.

Google is special in that it uses a map of ranked links to your site to determine your sites status in a search. In other words, links from higher-ranked sites to your site help your page ranking more than links from lower-ranked sites.

Providing Contact Info: Email, Voice and Snails
Web contact pages should provide info for company emails, telephone numbers and snail-mail. Grouping by job function and/or department helps a user determine who to contact. If there is an employee who responds to specific user needs, state that clearly on the contact page.

Live Chat??
A variant on instant messaging for companies that have a very large customer base and can afford a large infrastructure.

Guestbooks
Guestbooks allow visitors to your site to leave contact info, questions and comments. Guestbooks are useful for companies that send mass mailings. Email links to a particular person or department may be more useful for your company than a guestbook.

News, Calendars and Special Events
Your web site can be used to post current information. Frequently updated News, Calendar and Special Event web pages are another tactic to encourage search engines to index your site.

Identity Verification for Field Employees and Salespersons
Web contact pages that post employee portraits can function as a way for your clients to verify your employees' identity and status.

On-line Tools: Calculate, Aggregate, Diagnose
Would your company benefit from the development of on-line tools?
Virtualization of software tools is a part of an Internet users browser experience. Mortgage, real estate and other financial companies are putting on-line calculators on their web pages. Shopping carts that calculate shipping and taxes are commonplace on retail sites. There are web sites that can diagnose problems with your health, your car, or your web pages. Companies must do a cost-benefit analysis before committing to the implementation, development and maintenance of a virtual tool.

Levels of Privacy and Security

1. Open: Available from the main site
2. Unlinked: available to search engines, but not linked into the main site; you can give this address to customer (and they can give it to someone else.)
3. Hidden from robots and spiders: UNavailable to search engines, and not linked into the main site; you can give this address to customer (and they can give it to someone else.)
4. PW protected: You can give this password to an employee or customer (and they can give it to someone else.)
5. Encrypted: stored info that requires a current password or key to access in any way.
6. Local: hey, that’s your biggest security concern.

{What are the modes of communication currently used by your company and how could they be enhanced and made more productive by support from the web? Printed paper? Email? Telephone? Meetings?}

Sales

Services And Products

Bios
Put as many employees as possible on a site-- pictures, bios, job description, etc. This greatly increases the chances that a new customer will call. ---it's also  great for morale and self esteem.  (e.g., most real estate sites market the agents as much as the properties)

Company History And Culture

Inventory And Catalog

Sample Contracts

Calendars and Schedules

Terms Of Credit And/Or Payment

Databases

Company Announcements

Company News Releases and Awards

Employee Handbook

Emergency and Safety Procedures

Human Resources And Morale Building
Nothing builds morale like putting someone's picture on the site.

Recruiting
Your site attracts potential employees even without direct references to employment on the site. The web site is where your future employees get their first impression of your company. A web site that accurately reflects your company will increase the number of quality resumés from job applicants.

White Papers, Education, and Public Service
(Why buy the cow if the milk is free?)
Many companies publish white papers and other free information on their site. A white paper typically describes a real world problem and its solution. White papers are a public service, and not only do they attract searches, they attract visitors to your site who may be potential customers, collaborators or employees.

Outgoing, Incoming & Reciprocal Links
Outgoing links to other sites help to validate your site with search engines (such as Yahoo) that base their ratings primarily on your content rather than your traffic. Providing useful information encourages other sites to link to you-- and those links from other sites are the basis of much of your Google search ranking-- so we want as many links as possible FROM other sites TO your site. If you have an associate with a links page, offer to link to their page if they will reciprocate with a link to yours.

Get It On-Line Vs. The Design Process

Human Vs. Machine

Bigger Is Better Vs. Small Is Beautiful

Less Is More Vs. Less Is A Bore

The Big Picture Vs. For-Want-Of-A-Nail

The Web Site As A Work In Progress

Don’t Drink The Kool-Aide®

Respect common web navigation conventions

• Circular or square buttons should be reserved for navigation.
• Triangular graphics indicate a direction OR a folder to be opened or a list to be revealed.
• Colored type within a list or bodycopy indicated a hyperlink to another place.
• Main menu items are at the top or the left of a web page.
• Drop-down or pop-up menus are for lists of choices within a web space, not navigation to another space.

Organize content before finalizing a navigation system

• Design for a site map that resembles a tree, not a ball of twine.
• Links should lead out from the home page in branches that do not loop back on themselves.
• Many sites will require a main, constant set of navigation buttons and a secondary contextual set of navigation links.

Provide feedback to the user

• Text links should change color when a cursor passes over them.
• Graphic links should change color or form or reveal a menu or other new visual when a cursor passes over them.

Ornament and backgrounds as an aid to navigation

• Backgrounds may be used to identify various sections of the site.
• Backgrounds may be used to create a system of consistent sections on pages.
• Ornaments are used to distinguish one page from another.
• Ornaments are not used to "dress up" a page, but as an aid to navigation by providing visual variety.
  Hospital floor plans are a good metaphor for a web site, they have complex paths, all the halls kind of look alike and it can be hard to figure out where you're at. Hospitals put artworks in hallways not only to be uplifting, but to help people develop familiar paths through the building. Ornament and other unique content can function in the same way on a web site, helping users know if they have passed this way before.
• Ornaments are generally used less as one goes deeper into a site, so the presence or absence of ornament can also act as an aid to navigation.

A big part of the designer’s job will be rewriting and organizing copy. Clients need to generate a lot of copy quickly with the provision that much of it will not actually be used. The same goes for photos, just send the designer a ton of content and suspend judgments about how useful specific content might be -- great content sometimes comes out of the scraps.

The design of the average page in print or on the web is what should be developed first, then the front pages. Colors and ornament are derived from the utilitarian aspects of the common page rather than trying to shoehorn the main text to match a homepage.

Talk conversationally about the procedures used by your company when actually doing work--  informal language and verve is something we can use to punctuate otherwise dry copy.

Screen Size
What will be the typical monitor size of your users? Will your site be viewed on a desktop, laptop, or cellphone?

People with large monitors tend to use multiple windows of optimum viewing width, not single, newspaper-sized windows. So we design for the normal document window, not the entire screen. How a site works on a small screen or hand-held browser is of more concern to the designer than how it would work on a very large monitor.

The maximum line length for a line of web copy is 8". Longer lines tire the eye and make reading more difficult. Lines of copy longer than 8 inches won't print on a standard sheet of paper at 100%. Most people find 50 characters (about 10 words) or less per line to be the most comfortable reading line length.

Every Computer Is Different
Every computer shows a different version of the Internet. Hypertext especially must be variable or search engines (and blind users) cannot read it. It's tempting to tune a web site to look best on the CEO's computer terminal, but your site needs to look it's best on a typical user's computer and function correctly on most users' computers.