The Importance Of Website Pre-Planning

What’s the single most important aspect of web design, aesthetics or SEO? This is a question that will raise a lively debate but the answer you give will be heavily weighed by the job you do.

A graphic designer who specialises in visual design will suggest in many of cases that the website design is by far and away most important of course. And let’s be honest without that visually appealing to the eye design a searcher will leave your site within the blink of an eye or so they have you think. But then that raises the big question of how did they find your site in the first instance?

The basic web design criteria or curve goes along the lines of initial design is presented ..website design looks excellent and is given the go ahead. We need some content ok, we’ll rustle something up…..website goes live and time passes but no visitors!

And then even more time passes by until eventually perhaps months and sometimes years later the situation is either so dire or the company are having to invest in adwords that finally website promotion firm gets called in (or somebody gets intrigued by one of those SEO e-mails that seem to hound webmasters these days), and before you know it you are on a 6 month search engine marketing campaign to try and achieve some search engine results.

Is this the fast road to success? The thousands of website owners that have followed this exact or similar path will certainly argue that it most definitely is not as this hope for the best web development criteria delays any websites success by unacceptable periods of time, and even more frightening  results in thousands in lost profit, turnover and ongoing prospect capture.

In reality the search engines paid no heed to the visual aspects of web design but with minimal attention to search engine optimisation so often this first opportunity to make an impact when the web site first gets indexed is totally lost, if all the search engines find is a poorly optimised site with no regard paid to any SEM requirements or keyword capture.

Extra time and money spent on pre development SEO ,for example keyword research and optimisation gives an outstanding return on investment as invariably when the site goes live and gets indexed it will achieve a far better search engine position from the outset and it has been known for pre-optimised websites to hit a page one result straight away.

What’s your view???