treymurray.com

Everyone wants the most beautiful website on the web. Everyone needs a website that communicates effectively the purpose for the web site. The two don’t often go hand in hand.

When I first started building websites, I used pictures and I had the best looking website on my college campus. The problem was, everyone I showed it to said, “That’s great, what’s the point?”

I didn’t have a clue. I didn’t know what my website was communicating because I had no clue what I wanted to communicate to the world.

I switched from computer science to communications that semester. It was crystal clear to me that a beautiful website was useless if it didn’t make sense.

I have since proven the theory that an ugly website that communicates is far better than one that is pretty that communicates nothing.

When you choose someone to design your website, be sure they know how to translate your message along with your vision.

To often today, people claim to be web designers.

Upon further inspection, most are not. They are merely page coders. What is the difference?

SEO – Search Engine Optimization.

Many times, people will hire the cheapest page coder, or worse yet, trust a program or template to do it all for them. As advanced as they are, computers will never be better at SEO than humans (because humans program them). Search Engines are employing more and more complicated algorithms and are becoming quite adept at filtering out duplicate content and ‘black hat’ SEO users.

Even if you were good at “beating” the search engines a few years ago, perhaps by building doorway web pages or flooding a page with search terms, you will no longer be able to obtain a higher ranking until your web pages match the formula set forth by the big search engines.

Large software companies are absorbing web server companies at an alarming rate and using them to offer free template websites, and free site design. Either the sites are “cookie cutter” and lack any real or unique content, or they are slapped together so quickly that no thought or time goes into making the website search engine friendly.

The web site is a communication tool, and as such, it should communicate. The user, and not the search engine is who the web site should communicate to. As long as that is kept in mind, and a clear plan is laid out before building a web site as to what search terms are going to be incorporated into the web pages, then the web designer is truly a designer, and not just a coder.

Yep, I’m doing it again.

I’m completely redesigning my website. Why?

I’m focusing on designing attractive and functional websites. In so doing, I need something for myself which will be easy to maintain and still bring in that wow factor. I have decided to move the way many companies are now.

Creating a blog using a software program such as WordPress greatly increases productivity by making it easier to update webpages while still allowing for a lot of flexibility in site design. WordPress also has so many plugins that you can completely customize it to your needs as well as integrate audio, video, or graphics.

I look forward in the coming weeks and months to adding in some flash as well as some other projects which will really showcase some of my talents. If you are interested at all in having a website built, having some web projects done, or just chatting about websites, please feel free to contact me using the link above or to the side.

As always, I encourage comments, but be forewarned, all comments pass through a spam filter and then I must approve them before they are shown. It is unfortunate that we live in a day and time where this is necessary, but I have to protect myself and this website against any and all malicious behavior.