Successful Maryland Website Design Tips

Around the Maryland business community the first half of 2010 has been about making less money go further and squeezing every last cent out of our budgets to try to eek out a profit. As the economy begins to recover and businesses can no longer put off infrastructure changes, websites need to be remodeled so that they can do more for companies. These 7 tips will help your Maryland business make the right choices in Maryland Website Design for a productive, efficient new corporate website.

1. Clean Design, Easy to Navigate: Your visitors are just as busy as you are. Provide them with a website that is easy to use. Your message should be clear and your products and services easy to find. Make sure the navigation is clear and try some tests before launching to ensure that your website does the things you want it to do. For instance ask the oldest member of your family to sign up for your newsletter, then stand behind him or her and see how easy it really is to do.
2. Add Social Media Icons because social media continues to grow, especially LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook. Linking to your website to your profiles allows you to build communities with you as an expert in your products and services. You can promote your ideas and causes. You can communicate in less of a formal manner on social media and you are not constrained by the parameters of your website.
3. Replicate Print Media in your Maryland website design. People are used to reading magazines and brochures where the images and the text around them work together in the layout. Your web design should work around video, audio, and images to give the user content in clear design that function interactively.
4. Design for Mobile phones. More and more people are using their phones to find local businesses, especially restaurants, doctors, hotels, and services. Test your website on various mobile devices to make sure navigation works and any animation plays. You may find that you have to design a “mobile version” of your site in straight HTML to accommodate the various mobile devices.
5. Design using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for better search engine friendliness. CSS allows you to structure your markup so that it semantically makes sense and the most important content can be put closer to the top of the page for search engines. Your design should incorporate text navigation links and alt tags for images so that search engines can read all content.
6. Open Source Content Management Systems like WordPress and Drupal allow non-technical employees to update web content, saving on web maintenance costs. Your website should be built around an easy platform that’ll allow you to rank well and quickly make changes. WordPress websites easy to use, look professional, are less expensive than in house content management systems, and are used by large companies like the Wall Street Journal and National Geographic. WordPress allows you to easily add galleries of videos or photos, connect to your online communities, let your website become a corporate portal, and of course you can also blog.

Maryland Website Design in 2010 is all about stretching your dollar, and these website design tips will help you do that.