Working with designers and SEO – #ProSEO Seminar 2010
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Working with designers and SEO – #ProSEO Seminar 2010

26th October 2010

Now for Distilled’s Leonie Wharton’s simple tips on getting the best out of your relationship with your designers.

(Sorry guys, no time to cover Andy’s tips on technologies & SEO – watch out for his blog post on the Distilled blog soon.)

Firstly, learn to communicate better with designers – it’ll help everyone!

– Let them know about design restrictions, especially if they are coming from a print background. Use something like a progressive enhancement methodology to ensure every step has its i’s dotted and t’s crossed.

– Show your designers where they need to focus on simple text areas but also let them know where they can have fun.

NB. The SEO should enforce sign-off and they should be involved right from the get-go. Start at the wireframes stage. Nothing should be a bad surprise as each of the stages progress, make sure your designer knows exactly what the final goal is from the very beginning.

– Try to provide your designer with the actual content, and help them understand what the key content is – as well as which images are going to sit alongside that content.

– You may need to reign the designer in on the font side of things, make sure there is a set style guide so you also know what you are doing if they are not there but you want to add content.

– Increase page speed – you can lower the file size, as long as you can maintain a decent image quality!

– However large or small, finding the right content should be simple if the information architecture is logical and the design is clear. Use simple wireframe templates.

– Make navigation obvious – don’t let your designer run away with their ideas

– Splash pages – enough said right.

– Breadcrumbs are an easy area a designer to miss out without guidance, same for text on category pages

Call to Actions

– Are they obvious? Squint at the page, can you still see them?

– Think contract to other website colours

– Do your buttons look clickable?

– Make sure the text on your button is an action – e.g. sign up, book now etc.

– Don’t clutter a page with too many call-to-actions as they lose their weight on the page

– Remember positioning – they should be at the end of the form, in line with where the user is used to clicking. Don’t move the button away.

Infographics

– Don’t just use Google Images!

– Analyse what similarities your infographic content has

– Note down any visual references

– Decide on a colour pallete

– Include graphs and silhouette imagery

– Choose one font for the title and another for the body copy text

– Highlight key facts as either pull quotes or by using bold colours

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Written By
Originally from the UK via France and Malaysia, Annabel Hodges is a digital marketer with long experience in the industry now residing in Sydney. She heads up the Digital Marketing at Next Commerce, working across an array of products, channels and brands.
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