The most beautiful site nobody can see (Saturated Market)

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The most beautiful site nobody can see

Strategy They say that beauty is skin deep. They also say that it's what inside that counts. And beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The same holds true on websites. There are a lot of great looking sites out there. And when visitors arrive to your site, you want them to stay; so naturally, you want it to look good.

But what if that comes at a price?

Too many times, I've seen sites that look terrific; they have all the colours right, a great layout, easy navigation...but when you look below the surface, you find yourself scrolling through endless ugly code before finding any content.

So what? Code IS ugly. It always has been, and though it may not always be, it will for some time to come. But you have to remember who looks at the code: search engines. And bloggers with too much time on their hands.

Let's face it, while every search engine is different, they usually have a cut-off point for how many lines they're willing to read of your code before the spiders stop reading. And with the dwindling power of Meta tags, it's becoming more and more essential every day to make sure your content and its keywords are in the right place. This is the same problem people encountered a few years ago when Flash sites became the big thing.

Really, what good is a great looking website if nobody can FIND it?

I think this is part of the reason for the move towards cleaner, less busy sites. Not just the fact that those cluttered messes are horrific to look at and use; but if there's less junk in the trunk, you get faster load times, less chances for something to go wrong (God forbid you miss a semicolon in your CSS), and a better chance of being noticed when your potential readers click "search".

Until next time,