Stan Berliner

First, a personal observation: I like designing web sites. Doing it right is a source of satisfaction.

I have a consultants perspective, having been an independent consultant for over thirty years. I thus know how important marketing and selling are for survival.

Understanding how a "shopper" views a web site is critical. How text and graphics are seen and understood aids or detracts from its validity. I try to address what motivates people to buy-in to something. "Usability" is thus an important criteria for the web sites I design.

Being able to see consultant web sites from both the user side as well as the provider side - that, I believe, adds value to my web site designs.

How It's Done
My preference is to produce easy to read, easy to navigate, professional-looking web sites, with a minimum of bells and whistles*. I try to present a consultant's strengths and specialties clearly, convincingly and unambiguously.

*I believe bells and whistles have a place, but not if they get in the way of clarity and focus. (Of course, if you are selling bells and whistles, that's another story.)

Commercial web sites are designed with two potential visitors in mind: for the person or organization with an application for your services or products, and for search engines. Search engines send reviewers or robots to each web site to determine if (and where) the web site should be listed by them.

For potential clients, your web site should economically state what you're offering and be convincing that: (1) they (the potential clients) are in the right place, (2) you are a credible source for what's needed, and, (3) you are someone they should want to speak with further.

Web sites I design address those questions, usually in that same 1,2,3 order. The first thing a visitor to your web site should see is an answer to "Am I in the right place?" A flashy, dynamic opening screen is good, as long as it addresses that first question. Otherwise it just delays getting to the point.

Establishing your credibility is generally done by focusing on specifics: what you provide, what makes it valuable, accomplishments, etc. This information may be quite lengthy so it's best put on an interior page. Your opening screen should be kept lean and quickly readable.

Addressing the other kind of visitor, the search engine robot or reviewer, this is trickier. Search engines look for certain things in a web site and if they don't find them, or don't find them where they expect them to be, the web site is either ignored altogether, put in a category unrelated to a potential client's interests, or carried so far back in a category listing, it probably will never be found by anyone conducting a search.

What a search engine looks for first is a match between what's entered into the "search for" box and the same word or phrase somewhere on your web site's opening screen. This "keyword" or keyword phrase, along with other such keywords that a searcher is likely to use, should appear early in your web site: in the first paragraph, in the title, in the logo, in the hidden (meta) files. Better yet, it should be in all those places. The same first screen portion of your web site should have a short description of what the web site is about. This description is picked up by the major search engines to use in its listing for the site.

Attention to keywords is just part of the story. For a web site to be assigned a favorable position in a listing category relies on a number of factors. Web site popularity is one such factor. One indicator of popularity is the number of other web sites that link to your site. Then, of course, there is advertising. I will help a web site owner to select an advertising program that suits the goals, market and your marketing budget.