How To Identify A Quality Website Design Company

The website design industry is highly competitive with many different businesses all-competing for your clientele.  This provides a great buyers market for web design services and you should utilize this buyer’s advantage to secure the right company for you.

When choosing the right website design company you should consider the following:

1) How Many Questions Do They Ask:  A website design company that asks many questions about your business, customers, products and goals is more likely to produce a web design you are happy with.  When they don’t ask you many questions it is highly probably they will be using templates to design your website from.

2) View Their Complete Portfolio:  Ensure that you request to view their complete portfolio and in conducting the review note the use of colours and styles in their design.  It the website design company appears to use only one style or limited colours then gauge whether these colours and styles suit your business.

3) Do They Have A Plan:  A quality web design company will have a planning document which walks you through the process of building your website.  The more comprehensive the plan the more likely you are to be working with a professional company.

4) Ask Them About SEO:  While the actual website designer does not need to know SEO it’s important that someone within the company can clearly articulate the benefits of SEO.  All website designs now need basic SEO integration to ensure traffic generation and success.

5) Call Their Recent Clients:  Choose 2 recent clients of the web design company to call and ask them about their experience.  Specifically find out how smooth the process was and any potential sticking points you should know about.

6) Who Owns the Copyright:  This can be a major problem with some website design companies as they wish to maintain copyright on all their work.  Unfortunately this is not what you desire, you want to own full copyright to the materials produced for you.

7) Set the Deadline:  Prior to engaging the website design company makes sure you tell them of your set deadline of delivery.  Ask them if they can confidently deliver on time and meet your targets.  If they are unable to then you need to find a company that will.

8) Source File Access:  A quality website design company will give you full unrestricted access to the source files which run your site.  By having this access you can always have another designer edit your files rather than engaging the same company.

When you find a website design company that fits these major criteria you are most probably working with a quality company.  It’s important to remember that you need to like the company you are working with so ensure their personality style meets yours!

Google Panda Update – How It Affects Search Engine Optimisation

As you know Google is the primary search engine that all businesses are aiming to dominate and recently a major update has been released affecting all websites. It is not uncommon for Google to release updates as they are constantly improving the way they rank sites, as a business owner it is your responsibility to ensure your website keeps track with those updates.

At Sigma InfoTech our teams of experts have studied the latest update called the “Panda Update” and identified three major changes to Search engine optimisation in the update you need to understand:

SEO Major Change 1: Poor Quality = Poor Results

In the Panda Update Google changed the algorithm it uses to index and rank sites so that it discounted low quality, low value sites. Sites that have unique, valuable content will be ranked higher then sites that have low value, duplicate content.

No longer can a cheap, duplicate content site rank well in the search engine you must invest in building quality sites with well-written and well-researched content. This is not something new though as at Sigma InfoTech we have always told our clients they need quality content and quality sites to get long-term search engine results.

Search Engine Optimisation Major Change 2: Become Google’s Content Partner

The second major change in the Panda Update is Google has stated publicly they will reward trusted, high quality sites. It is important right now to ensure you are optimizing your site effectively and within Google’s terms of service. If you are doing this then you will be rewarded by Google, here is the direct quote from Google:

“Google depends on the high-quality content created by wonderful websites around the world, and we do have a responsibility to encourage a healthy web ecosystem. Therefore, it is important for high-quality sites to be rewarded, and that’s exactly what this change does.”

When creating your website ensure you are producing content and pages on your site that reflect what Google and your visitor requires. Sigma InfoTech clients should be elated with this news as all of your websites are built on this principle.

Website Optimisation Major Change 3: Win-Win-Win

An out-dated but often used technique for Search Engine Optimisation is to write content designed to rank well in search engines without considering your readers. The “Panda Update” is forcing website publishers to provide content that is “Win-Win-Win”.

Win 1: Provide content that readers and visitors want to read and find valuable

Win 2: Provide content that is well search engine optimised and easily indexed by Google

Win 3: Rank well because you have achieved your visitors and Google’s goals

Simply put, the Panda Update means website owners who are making an investment in quality content, quality web design and website design quality coding will be rewarded. Google is trying to improve the quality of their search engine results and by following their simple rules you will start to rank well.

Web Design-Significance of Web Usability in Website Design

Web usability is to make easy and efficient way, for your users to find, what they are looking for through an effective Web design. An effective website design can increase the time spent by each customer on your website and thereby improving the chances of increasing the sales or generating a lead.


Uniformity forms an integral part of a Good Web site design


Users have steadily become adapted to a particular layout for a web site design and thus have become the standard for most of the websites. Some of them are:

1) “Organization logo” at the top left with logo linking back to the home page.

2) “About us” is used for organizational information.

3) “Navigation bar” at the same place on each page.

4) Anything flashing and places above your logo is probably an “advertisement”

4) Information like “Privacy policy and terms of use” in the footer


There are numerous other unrecorded conventions that people have started to expect. It is important that Web Site Designers should appreciate the prominence of these conventions in a web site design as we are steadily becoming used to these things while accessing a website.


Size can cost!
It is important for a site to load quickly as customer is very impatient to get the information he want. An average user will not wait for more than 6-7 seconds for a page to download.


Some aspects you may want to consider are:

1) Use CSS to layout your web page.
2) Use CSS to create navigation
3) Use Web optimized graphics


Information should not be hidden


Ensure that it is easy to access and find information on the website. A good web site designer will always makes it easier for people with all sorts of interests to find information. Your web site design should provide info for those people who need just brief information and also for people who want to find as much as possible for the product and services.


Navigation as important as content


We understand the importance of web site navigation in any web site design. Make sure that the navigation makes it easier for people to find information on the web site. There is no point in having a lot of content on your website if no body is going to find it. Make sure that no information is more than three clicks away.


These are only a few points you should consider when developing a good web site design. It is always a good idea to show your website to your family and friends with different Internet skill levels and find out how easy or difficult it is for them to find the information on your website.


Sigma InfoTech an Australian based Website design, website development firm specialising in web design, graphic design, Software Development, search engine marketing, Search Engine Optimisation helps to remain high in the search engines and with it any of the sites can achieve the desired goal of influencing profits.

A good Web page design means overall performance of site to end users and search engines

Its so exciting while developing a website design for your business and after the launch of your very attractive web design business owners thinks like any thing. Six months or one year down the line most of the site owners feel nothing about the site as business generation from the site is near to zero. Such business sites just act like a non performing assets to the businesses. Are you having the same problem with  your so called attractive website design. Purpose of this article is to understand the web site design and development process and to apply continuous and strategic changes in the site on regular intervals.

Biggest mistake any new web site owner probably does is of saving money by getting website design by a freelancer or by a web site design company offering such cheap services. Please understand that a web site design comprises of many things like look and feel of the site, Search engine status of the site and over all interactive ability of the site. Freelancer of unprofessional website designers may give you very attractive website design but often they fail to optimize other aspects of the site like search engine friendliness of the site.

As a matter of fact more then 90 percent visitors to any web-page comes through the google and other search engines. Means the major chunk of the traffic coming to the site is not direct traffic. People search with a key word over the google or other search engine and what ever google result displays user clicks over that only. Google obviously is not a human and that's why it looks certain technical parts of your site to decide what is the relevancy and usefulness of your site. First and foremost thing while going for a web-page design is to think about the key words your web design should target.

Suppose you have a business of real estate and provides your services globally then think as a person searching for the real estate via google or other search engine. What probably he or she will type in the search box of the google? Well my guesses are real estate for sale, Good real estate venues, Real estate investment so on and so forth. Be advised to prepare a list of as many key words as you can think of. Then as a trend a normal web page design may target 5-10 key words only. You may ask how to decide the best 10 key words from the list? Well I will say let the google or other search engine answer your question. Search with each key word on the list in search engine and see the amount of results like 122302124 search results for key word real estate. This is called the competition for the particular key word higher the competition on the keyword means lower the chances your web page being on the top 10 search engine result pages.

Don't forget to check the traffic over a particular key word. Confused? let me make it simple suppose a key word let us say "real estate" has what traffic over a particular search engine. Traffic on a key word is the number of people searching with the same key word over the search engine normally displayed per month basis. Our key word "real estate" have a traffic of 5000 searches globally means their are at least 500 searches made during the recent past with the same key word within a month. Higher traffic on a key word indicate the potential of the key word to generate the business.

  Summary – Site owners consider their web page design as a non performing assets very soon. Infect the best web page design too take some time to get response. Proper key word targeting and search engine friendliness of web page design are two very important factors to drive traffic over the web site.