Clients regularly come to us for advice on how to make the best of their recently developed website. Having assumed that a revamped website would instantly attract sales or enquiries they have been left underwhelmed by the response.

Having an attractive website is only the starting point for what should really be a full online marketing strategy.

It’s important that the functionality of your website facilitates your ongoing marketing activity with features such as newsletter sign up, voucher code functionality (if appropriate) and prominent calls to action such as contact and call back forms.

Perhaps the most important thing to consider is exactly how your potential customers/clients are going to find you. The internet, after all, is a rather large place and finding your site could well end up like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Optimising your website for the search engines is essential because without doing so you have very little chance of rivalling your competitors. What is the point of having a website at all if your customers can’t find it?

The optimisation of your website is not just a one-off activity; it should also be ongoing in order to ensure the highest possible rankings on Google, ahead of your competitors.

Ideally your website should be built with all of these things in mind. The best websites are built to suit the aims of the business, but this is not always the case, First Internet regularly advises clients on their ongoing online marketing strategy and how to amend their existing website to help with their long term goals.

Remember, your website shouldn’t just be for show, it should function as an integral part of your marketing strategy.

But once you arrive there, what are the other types of web design Manchester properties use to enhance your experience?

One often-overlooked consideration is that of colour: it can support branding, evoke emotion, and even imply certain product characteristics.

We noted how the Manchester United site ranks highly on a natural search for ‘Manchester’ – but what colour do you think it is?

On your first visit, you’ll actually encounter a mostly black splash page, without much of the vivid red for which the club is famous.

It’s a subtle approach to website design Manchester United may have chosen to add a corporate feel to their homepage – and, once you’re in, things are much brighter to help keep your attention.

The University of Manchester has a well-defined website theme consisting of the colours (primarily purple) and fonts it has used since 2004, when it was created through the merger between the Victoria University of Manchester and the science and technology institution UMIST.

Finally, official tourism site Visit Manchester has a vibrant tabloid-style layout with candy colours, perfect for grabbing the attention of holidaymakers, and with subtle rollover highlights to help pick out the links on the homepage.

Three very different approaches to website design Manchester’s top-rankers are using right now, but all appropriate in their own ways – which would work best for you?

The finished product may look great but if nothing fits, it’s going to look stupid!

There are many articles debating which is more important, your website’s content or the design of your website. The truth is, they’re both equally important and neither one would work well without the other. Your website could have excellent copy which is really engaging and informative, but if it’s laid out badly and your website looks dull and boring, who’s going to stick around and read it? Equally, if your website looks the bee’s knees with eye-catching imagery, an attractive colour palette and a cool logo, but doesn’t have any substance behind it, then users will leave your website disappointed and probably won’t come back.

So how do we strike the right balance?

Any good website should start with plenty of planning. Begin with the skeleton of the site – a sitemap – What pages do you need? What subpages (if any) do you need? What order should they be in? Once you’ve built the skeleton start thinking about the heart and life-blood of the site – the content (text and imagery) for each page. You may find that some pages have very little content and may not warrant a full page to itself, or vice versa.  A page may have lots of content and need to be broken up into sections.  Once you’ve written the content, the sitemap might need amending. You might need an outside perspective to help you with this if you get stuck and this something we’ve helped a number of our clients with.

Here’s where your designer steps in.

OK so you’ve got the skeleton, and a beating heart pumping rich content through the veins of your site. Now you need to add some skin and dress it up so it’s appealing enough for your customers to read. This is the job of the designer, it’s their job to make your content stand out, look organised, professional and trustworthy.

Standing out: Make sure the designer knows what your key messages and core values are. These can be expressed by stunning imagery or pieces of typography art that can be used on your homepage to catch the user’s attention.

Layout and organisation: The designer will read through all your text and decide the best way to lay it out. There are a multitude of options and techniques. The basic ones include multiple columns – splitting the copy up into manageable bite size chunks, either in halves, thirds, quarters, or maybe even fifths or sixths. Introducing drop caps, block quotes, highlights, icons and info boxes are other simple ways to make your text easier to read. Interactive functions can also be used so the visitor has more control over what information they see. Such functions include Tabs, Accordions and Toggles. These are very useful when a page has a lot of information that may be overwhelming for the user.

Tabs

Take a look at HJ Slate’s About Us page to see it in use.

Accordions

Toggles

Discreet Investigations Services page is a good example of how toggles can be used.

These functions usually negate the need for subpages.

Professional and Trustworthy: All of the above techniques should be used wisely and only where necessary. Being sensible about what techniques to use and when to use them will be the deciding factor to whether or not your website looks professional. If your website looks professional then this will bestow a sense of trust within the user and keep them coming back to your website.

The Alternative

When a designer doesn’t have content to work with, they’re forced to use Lorum Ipsum (dummy text) and stock imagery (covered in watermarks). This method is fine in the short-term if you need 2 or 3 draft designs creating quickly, but it often leads to a lot of later changes to the design once the content has been added.  It’s usually quicker in the long term to plan and write the content beforehand.

So what do you have to do to get there? I took a look at the types of SEO Manchester’s highest-listed sites have in place.

I used Google’s link: and site: operators along with a look at the sites themselves – and I logged out of Google first, to remove any personal settings that might affect the data.

URLs

Of the top ten sites, eight had URLs containing the word ‘Manchester’ and it appeared at the front (after the www.) of six.

Top-ranked Manchester United don’t actually have ‘Manchester’ in their URL (www.manutd.com) – and nor do ninth-placed Manchester Metropolitan University (www.mmu.ac.uk).

Interestingly, six of the top ten were .com or .co.uk domain names, proving there’s room at the top for commercial sites.

On-Page SEO

Wikipedia’s ‘Manchester’ page had by far the most uses of the word itself, at a hefty 554.

Travel guides www.manchester2002-uk.com, www.manchester.com and www.visitmanchester.com all hit double-figures, along with the Manchester Evening News site (www.manchesteronline.co.uk).

All five of the others – including the Manchester United website – had only single-digit usage of the word ‘Manchester’ on their homepages.

Pages and Links

With almost a million pages and 1,120 inbound links, Manchester United ranks second on this particular list – the second-placed University of Manchester has a massive 1.1 million pages on its site, and almost 2,000 inbound links.

However, with 280,000 pages in its Community section, the Manchester United website has great levels of interactivity.

SEO for Manchester Sites

This whistlestop tour of Manchester’s best-performing websites for search shows there is room for commercial sites at the top of Google’s search results.

An optimised domain name or URL structure can help, while adding interactivity – and adding keyword-optimised content in general – is a useful way to boost your search visibility, and raise your rankings as a result.

At the end of the last century the Internet went through its boom years. Businesses discovered a new way to reach their consumers. Retailers were able to open shops to customers 24 hours a day. Invaluable educational resources were made available to millions. The cost of having an Internet connection in the home plummeted and more and more people joined in on what is arguably the greatest invention of all time.

Over the last decade, as Internet popularity increased and more and more businesses became savvy to having a presence on the web, the focus grew on innovative new ways to entice users to their websites and, just as importantly, keep them there. This competitiveness has meant that most website owners have had to keep on their toes by coming up with brand new concepts for usability and purposefulness whilst keeping a keen eye on their competitors’ websites.

One thing that we probably all take for granted is the extent of usability and relevance found on most websites today. Just as in the “real” world, where product competitiveness and consumer demands means that we’ll eventually reach those Star Trek standards of cloaking devices, transporters and food replicators, website competitiveness and user demands have meant that we can enjoy easier to use, more interactive, more socially integrated and communicative websites that give us what we wanted.

I took a little trip in the Wayback Machine and decided to take a look at the BBC News website. Comparing the BBC News website from 2001 with today’s version gives some stark, if not obvious, differences.

The old website is just plain functional. “Here is a news article”. “Here is the next news article”. “Here is my navigation menu”. Like most old websites it has a linear feel, not just the look, but the usability, too. If you want to read a news article, great! That’s something that this website can help you with. And you can see that a news article page shows just that – the article.

But what about doing more than just looking at that piece of news? What about the interactivity? What about the content that’s going to make you read on and go to other stories that relate to this article? What about the media to support those boring words? What about the fun?

A peek at the BBC News website of 2012 answers those questions perfectly. Flicking between the tabs in the browser highlights the massive differences between the two websites.

In 2012, the home page has an immediate brochure-like or magazine-like feel to it. I immediately feel I want “get into it”. The main headline isn’t just at the top and it’s not only prominent, as per a real newspaper or magazine, but the content is presented in different ways that you can choose to digest. I want to watch this article! Well, then, forego the reading and go straight to watching the headline. Q&A sections? Hmm… I don’t have the time or energy to read the whole article, so let’s take a peek at those nicely condensed bullet points instead. What’s that? A timeline, too?!

Ensuring that you retain your visitors for what they’re there for means that content needs to be innovatively presented in different ways where possible. In this case, those different ways can then lead you to related media, which can then invite you to other related media, and the chain continues. It’s easy to start reading about phone hacking and finish up on an article related to a cat invading a football pitch without even noticing or remembering how you got there.

Another aspect of websites like this includes user-driven content. The users who use the website are, well, the users, so it’s a great idea to let them decide what content is important – to them individually and communally. Most popular, most read, most watched, “people who bought this also bought this…”, product comparisons, reviews and comments, share this page, etc. The content becomes rich and purposeful to the users. Users similar to other users want to read their contributions or maybe find out what they discovered to save themselves the time of doing it themselves.

This is where the key emphasis has changed over the last decade. It’s no longer a case of building a well-structured website with menus and sub menus and banners and buttons. These things become irrelevant when the main demands of the user are to be able to get to the content they want and complete their “goal” in an easy, fun and quick way, whether it is a purchase or an interaction.

Of course, not all websites can be compared to the BBC News website. It’s a niche organisation, for starters. But the hallmarks of the modern website are well demonstrated in their own. They are a perfect example of adapting quickly with the times as Internet users become ever lazier and ever more demanding.

But today we’re addressing one form of website design Manchester companies may have missed – the power of news.

Adding a news section to your website is a great way to keep it looking up to date, particularly if the rest of your content doesn’t change much.

You can go for a formal industry news approach, or a chattier, blog style – either way, you not only add fresh content to your site, but also raise its search visibility.

New figures from comScore highlight this fact – the UK has the highest online usership in Europe at an average of 38.2 hours per month, compared with 27.8 hours across Europe and 24.4 hours worldwide.

Almost half (47.8%) of all European internet users visited a news website in November 2011.

Of those, 12% arrived via Google and 10% had just visited Facebook – suggesting they either clicked a link from the social network, or typed in the news site’s address based on a status update they’d just read.

If your website has no news, you could be missing out on a search audience that spans half the population of Europe – so is it time to add some headlines to your site?