Magical ideas to Design Social Media-Friendly Websites

Designing websites is a multidisciplinary endeavor. Though writing the codes and creating the pages are important, we cannot lose sight of the fact that they are amongst the things we keep to the last. The first step in designing a social media friendly website is creating the concept, and then defining the contents. Concepts, believe is not born or created overnight.

 

Reduce Your Concepts into Writing

Before concepts are reduced to writing, they undergo elaborate scrutiny within the mind of the person conceptualizing the website. It means defining contents, creating photographs, commissioning authors for writing and setting goals, and even setting a time frame for its implementation. All this takes time, and more so if you plan to have a website with lots of media contents like videos, photos and graphics. If you try to do all these singlehandedly, the effort itself may run into eternity.

The first step you are supposed to be doing, after you have conceptualized, is to put them on paper. On a sheet of paper draw boxes (also known as modules) and decide what should go where. If you are confused, take a look at one of your competitors’ websites. They can inspire you to come up with something unique. You must nevertheless avoid copying details. The rule is to keep your website unique to the core.

Deadlines are Important, without them Your Website Won’t see the Light of the Day

Without deadlines it is difficult to achieve your objectives, and if your work progresses at a slow pace, your concepts may get outdated, and that means another round of conceptualizing and redefining, and recreating fresh contents and so on. The whole process will never come to an end.

Still another problem that delays bring in is cost overrun. Every moment you procrastinate, remember, your business is losing opportunities somewhere. Still another important thing to consider is the budget. If you propose to leave the designing part to a professional, consider the price tag closely. There are people who will do it for couple hundred dollars and upward running into thousands.

Planning Your Website’s Content

The rules for designing social media friendly websites are the same as for any website, and a little more. For example if your website is going to depend on You Tube substantially, then your website must have enough of video contents, because you know that is where from your visitors will be coming, and for them videos and nothing else will work. If your visitors are going to come from Twitter, keep your text contents light and delightful, and if they are from LinkedIn provide a work they can accomplish, and that is because LinkedIn patrons are either searching for jobs or want someone to work for them.

Choose Your Landing Page Carefully

When your website depends on visitors who come from social media, they have a preset idea about where they are going. That means, you should have a different landing page for each of them, and it should add value to what they have already seen in the social media from where they came. Not all social media are the same – demographics, users’ age, sex and social status all differ from social media to social media, and so are even their preferences. Your content should take all those into consideration. For some visitors videos are anathema, some simply hate text and still others may prefer everything in graphical forms. There are some who will only want photographs and nothing else. So be responsive to your readers’ requirements and expectations.

Responsive Design is a Must

If you have already seen the writings on the wall, you must also be aware that social media users are increasingly using handheld devices, and that is not to say that personal computer and Mac users are in the decline. And it should also be noted that within the handheld devices market, there are different OS users – Android, Windows 8 Phone OS, iPhone OS and even some new entrants like Chrome OS. Your website’s design should therefore be accommodative to all these multifarious requirements.

Your website design will be effective only when it is able to respond to different browsers, and there is no dearth to it either – Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Safari… and so on. Test your design for compliance with each of them. Though the better known browsers are designed to effortlessly render codes written in HTML5, CSS 3 and other accepted standards, there are still some nuances peculiar to one or more of browsers. If you can avoid these peculiarities and stay within conventional coding, good, otherwise find a way out so that you don’t have issues to battle later on.

Separate Content from Layout and Designing

During the early days of the Internet, designing web pages used to be fairly simple, but tedious to accomplish. It simply meant writing hundreds of pages containing codes after codes and linking one page to another with URLs. They were not particularly suited for adding contents on a daily basis, leave alone adding pages by the minute.

Ground realities today are vastly different, especially if you plan to link your website to social media where you have to add tons of pages on a regular basis. You can overcome this problem by adopting a relevant content management system (CMS). By adopting a CMS, you will have separated content from designing.

The principal benefit that accrues when using CMS includes changing designs whenever you have the need to do it. Some of the better known free CMSs are WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. Each has its own pros and cons which you must evaluate in detail. Incidentally, CMSs are better supported in public forums and updates come more frequently as well.

Designs and SEO Compliance

Whether you like it or not, SEO and designing are inseparable. When search engines evaluate your web pages for ranking, they take into consideration the efficiency of your pages’ codes as they relate to loading time of browsers. The longer it takes to load, more are the possibilities of a negative point accruing to the page. Most often you will be able to trace the problem to WSIWYG design tools if you used them for designing the pages. Generally, it’s best to stay clear from these types of tools if you want a better search engine rank. Search engines, remember, is where your website gets found.