What's the link between words and design, you would ask? Why does a designer need to have a little mastery over words and why is writing an integral aspect of web design? Is it not enough to know colors and fonts, is it not enough to have a creative eye, is it not enough to be skilled in every aspect of web design and development in order to become a great web designer? No, it's not – unless you know that writing matters to web design and take pains to include good writing into every site you design, it's not going to be as popular as you intend it to be. Writing is important to web design because:
Search engine optimization depends on it:
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If you're banking on the search engines to popularize your site, then it's the text that's going to do it. The crawlers read what's on your site, and that's why so much importance is accorded to keywords and their density. So if you pay attention only to your design without knowing that the text that goes into it is important too, you're going to end up with a good-looking site no doubt, but one that does not show up in search engine results.
Its placement is important:
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The most common mistake that most people make when it comes to writing for their sites is to misuse keywords – rather than using them subtly and cleverly as a natural part of the write-up, they insert them randomly into the text, sometimes even stuffing them into sentences even though they don't belong there. This technique would probably get you into the search engine lists; however, when visitors click on your link, they're going to be disappointed if they find that they were lured there under false pretenses – they can see that you've stuffed your pages with keywords, but that the text itself is worthless when it comes to the information they want.
Its relevance determines your success:
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Any designer worth their salt know that frames, images and other jazzy aspects of web design don't count when it comes to search engines. Text embedded within these is not relevant when it comes to boosting the popularity of your site and pushing it up in terms of page rank. So as a designer, unless you know where and how to place text so that it is visible to search engines and deemed as relevant by them, you haven't done the best you can in your efforts to make a success of the site.
You don't have to be a skilled writer to be a good web designer; all that's needed is that you know when, where and how to place the right kind of text so that it augments your design and complements its efforts to get your site noticed and appreciated.
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