Design is one of the foremost concerns for your website. Trying to figure out the aesthetics that best please your customer is very difficult. Ultimately, it doesn't matter what you personally like, because the customer will like something completely different.
You need to program your website so it best functions for your users.
Typical design concerns are:
* Width of the website. Do you want to be full screen or static width?
* Colors.
* What web browsers do you want it to work in? IE, Firefox and Safari are the big players.
* Do you want the website to work on a mobile device?
* Do you want to use a lot of images as part of the design?
* Do you want Flash? Remember Flash does not work in IE 64-bit, the standard browser for Windows 7.
* Do you want your website readable by users with visual impairments?
Of those 7 items, only the last two have a real impact on your SEO efforts.
Flash websites usually cause organic ranking to suffer. If you have a lot of money to spend with online advertising, you could get visitors through Google AdWords and not spend money on optimization. Even though Google is able to read Flash, it's still proven to be a detriment to website ranking.
You may not realize the extra steps someone with a visual impairment has to go through in order to read your website. They have screen readers that will literally read everything on the web page, except images. When it comes to images, the screen reader will simply skip it, or may say something like "there is an image."
To better benefit all types of users, you need to make sure to include a detailed description of every photos or image within the HTML code for the image. This is simply done by inserting an "alt" and "title" tag inside the image.
Example:
<img scr=“photo.jpg” alt=“Photo of a round brilliant solitaire engagement ring in white gold.” title=“Photo of a round brilliant solitaire engagement ring in white gold.”>
You see the "alt=" and "title=" are the same. You won't find many people using the "title," but for proper programming, that is used in the Firefox browser.
When a screen reader sees the alt/title tags it will read the words instead of saying "there is an image."
This extra detailed alt/title step not only helps to add extra information to your web page, but it shows Google that you are taking the extra time to correctly encode your website and your ranking will be rewarded for it.
