And that was the red flag we raised. Unfortunately we were the victims of a site outside our control that turned into a triumph of form over function and ignored this completely while nodding sagely at us. The pretties were the thing concentrated upon in our view. Hence my post here to raise awareness in case any of the crew were unaware.
Now our own site is a functional site. I can't claim it's pretty; graphic design is not my strong point. It has a job to do, and, if we can ever afford a designer (we're tiny), it gives them a sound structural basis to work from and the easy ability to separate the variable material from the semi-fixed material when redesigning the pretty parts.
Simple things are important, too, like making sure that both "www.domain" and "domain" on its own are accessible by visitors (and the visitor is directed automatically to the 'right' one) and making sure search engines don't get confused by this. This is all part of design. So is making sure that page urls are simple, simple, simple, ideally with no session ids, no "?" characters and the like
Site maps are vital, not so much for visitors - no-one reads a while web site anyway - but for search engines. The XML one needs to be created and updated with any changes and search engines need to know when it changes. Again this is all part of design
As you say so clearly, Tony, this is not just about the pretty. INdeed it is almost not about the pretty at all. If the technical side is ignored then it can be as pretty as it likes and it will fail to deliver what was hoped for.
I suspect a place to start is "What is our web site really meant to achieve?"
I asked that of ours and my answer was "Awareness" with a side benefit of "More visitors through the door more than it costs to run the site" In a couple of years we may form a different view.
On 25 Aug 2011, at 11:21, Tony Crockford wrote:
> On 25 Aug 2011, at 11:14, Tim Trent wrote:
>>
>> The redesign we were victims of lost them all anyway despite our raising this as a red flag before the migration took place.
>
> It should have been a simple matter of setting up a rewrite to redirect any inbound links to their new (or more appropriate) location and advising the browsers that the page has permanently moved (301)
>
> e.g (for Apache's .htaccess) RewriteRule ^making_visit\.html$ http://www.bclm.co.uk/visit.htm [R=301]
>
> monitoring the server logs for any 404's is a good way to pick up any that you missed, but absolutely the first job should be to map the existing site and decide where to redirect any urls that change.
>
> Design isn't just about the pretty.
>
> :)
>
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