Has Google Made Website Design Less Relevant?

[Sporkman]

Google Disrupts--Again

Lee Gomes, 03.05.09, 06:00 AM EST

The Internet giant's search engine could make Web site design and navigation obsolete.

...The traditional advice about building a Web site was to spend a lot of time in advance planning its organization, ensuring that all the inside pages fit together in a logical hierarchy. Next, navigation aids were placed on the home page, so that the routes to all that inside content were intuitive and readily apparent...

...But because of search engines, users end up never encountering that home page or availing themselves of the careful arrangement of the site's material.

Instead, they're taken directly to the inside page that has the specific material they are looking for. And once they find what they're looking for, they're off somewhere else....

http://www.forbes.com/2009/03/04/goo...rss_technology

[chesa7]

Seems to me design will always be important. Visitors aren't just coming to your site from search engines, they are also coming from your email campaigns, links, directories, etc. Also, based on stats of page views, lot of people do browse through the site and I think you always want to make that experience as effective as possible.

[garebear]

Yes, design is still important. Sometimes it is the first impression that customers have of your company. If your site looks sloppy and unattractive, they may think of your business in the same manner.

[ktaylor310]

Visitors don't always come in on secondary pages and, even if they do, often travel to the home page if they like what they've read. Clean & easy navigation will always be important.

It would be crazy not to plan out your site structure and layout in advance as you would end up losing time down the road when you try to add pages to the site. You would end up with a totally confusing site for visitors as well as for any web designers working on the site.

I think the only people who would jeopardize the quality of their site for Google are those obssessed with ranking. Ranking is nothing if you can't keep your visitors or turn those visits into sales.

[torka]

Where the alleged experts quoted in the article go wrong is that they miss the point. It's simply the concept of a "home page" as the inevitable landing page / first point of entry for visitors that Google et. al. are making less relevant.

With any page in the site potentially serving as the "first contact" a visitor might have with your site, it seems to me that good design (particularly obvious, easy-to-use, logical navigation) becomes even more important. It's not about designing a site as a hierarchy with a standard "path" through from Point A (the home page) to Point Z. And it's not about tossing the idea of logical site navigation totally out the window -- which virtually guarantees visitors will only hit the one page and leave.

I mean, the whole idea is to present an appealing site. One that appears to offer (and that actually does offer) compelling and useful content. One that makes it easy for visitors to orient themselves as to where they landed in the site, and where other related information might be found. One that encourages and guides visitors to completing the action the website owner most wants them to do.

The advice offered in the article might be appropriate in some cases for state agencies, which is who the "expert" generally works with. Their sites often serve a different function than business websites -- although I've come across many occasions where state government sites need to do a better job of making their sites easy to navigate, too.

The search engines don't always land the searcher on the exact correct page -- sometimes you end up "close but no cigar." Without good design and logical navigation, it's more difficult than it has to be for the visitor to find the information they really want. Those visitors may indeed simply hit the one page and leave, but it's not because they've found what they were looking for.

Frankly, I just don't see content versus design/navigation as an either-or situation. If you want a successful business website, both are equally important.

My

--Torka

[janicejan]

Creating a userfriendly layout are one of the most important factor that drives traffic and enable our visitors to stay more on our website, so I guess it was just a mis-interpretation of yours about website designs.

[ktaylor310]

In all fairness, Sporkman was just referring to an article and requesting opinions. He did not write the article himself.

[ugal]

Design was never relevant. Look at ebay, Amazon or Craigslist. As long as your website is easy to read, design is only there to decorate the content of your website. Content is king! Visitors will not come back for your design, they will come back for your content.

[lordspace]

I think the link structure is important and we need not to forget about that the pages we design are 1) for the visitor and then 2) for the bots if possible
Google will do all kinds of experiments and see what will work best for them.

I've heard about cases when the searcher doesn't even need to leave the google result page because site exceprt/summary that Google has found is pretty much enough for the searcher's question.

[Tom Young]

Design is important, but COPY IS King! It is what the crawlers look at.

Tom