Having a quality presence online is imperative for almost any business. Making sure that your website is optimized for search can help to drive quality traffic, resulting in increased leads or customers.  However, a website optimized for search will only go so far.  We often see prospects or clients who have worked to optimize their website - their positions for keywords have improved and their website has seen more traffic. But, at the end of the day, they are not getting more business. The next question we often get is, why not?

Well, as you can imagine, there are many factors that could play a role.  First and foremost, does the website have a goal?  It may be to inform the visitors, encourage them to fill out a form, purchase a product or complete another specific action. If so, is that goal clear to the visitor?  If not, then it can be beneficial to take a step back and determine how your site will lead to increased business for your company.

One more micro element to take into consideration is the color scheme. Colors play a significant role in the feelings that a website can evoke.  What colors do you use on your website?  They can say a lot about your brand and the way someone feels while on your website. A previous post was written about Color Psychology and how you can use it to influence your site visitors.  It is worth checking out to see how your site’s colors are being perceived. 

Search engines don’t take into account the color scheme of your website for indexing purposes.  If it has plain text that is crawlable and keyword targeted, your site can rank well.  The color choice of your website shouldn’t scare off your visitor, but rather should help direct them to achieve the goals that you have set.  Be sure that your colors mesh with the feelings of your company and brand and that same feeling is portrayed to the visitors of your site. 

Determining the placement of certain pages of ones site can be a challenging task for any webmaster. Many people, especially if you are new to developing websites, are perplexed by the question of whether or not to go the subdomain route (blog.example.com) or the directory route (www.example.com/blog).

The general consensus is that subdomains are usually reserved for pages that aren’t completely associated with the general theme of the site. Google, for example has http://maps.goolge.com, http://books.google.com/ and http://blogsearch.google.com/. From an SEO perspective, it has been said that “link juice” will not necessarily flow from the main domain to pages within a subdomain. This has proven not to be the case; however, as some webmasters have seen pages within their subdomains garner the same link value as their main domain.

The real question, though, is whether there is any kind of duplicate content on the subdomain. There is a trap that some webmasters fall into where, because they haven’t set up their site architecture in a logical manner, that some pages of their subdomain duplicate pages from their main domain. While this will rarely incur some kind of penalty within the search engines, it may prevent the search engines from crawling the most important pages on the website given the “crawler caps” the search engine spiders have in place. Matt Cutts of Google has said that for newer webmasters, the subdirectory structure is the way to go until you are more confident with your site’s architecture. I tend to agree.

All browsers have built-in margins and padding for html and can impact the meticulous layout of a design. Browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari may all render the spacing of the H1, p, ul, li,etc. differently.

To alleviate this problem and force the design to the margins and padding we specify, we must first set all of them to 0 pixels. This cancels out browser defaults. Now we can set our own heights and widths where needed. Below are two ways to accomplish this:

1. List all elements of the html and set the margin and padding to 0 pixels like this:

body, div, dl, dt, dd, ul, ol, li, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, pre, form, fieldset, input, p, blockquote, th, td {
margin:0;
padding:0;
}

- OR -

2. Use the Universal Selector which does the same as above, but in much lest code.

* {
margin:0;
padding:0;
}

Keeping your code clean and simple can decrease file size and ensure your pages load quickly.