The Yin and Yang of a Web Page?
Forgive me for sounding Zen but Yin and Yang is widely known as the two opposite forces that combine to make a whole. If you think of this web site in automotive terms, we do body work and detailing as well as work on the motor. You want to get there and look good doing it!
Let's take look at the Yin and Yang of a web page.
A web page has two separate but equally important aspects:
- Aspect 1 - the visual design ( the No. 1 reason for car sales in America) - this is for user appeal and navigation (GUI - or Graphical User Interface). This affects your status to the user. If the design is shabby you will be perceived that way. The site visitor only knows you by what he sees.
This part gets optimized for load time
- Aspect 2 - the code beneath the page (the motor) - this is the functional part seen by search engines and the servers that display your pages and is instrumental in performance and page ranking. If it is broken it will affect your front end design as well.
This part gets optimized for relevant content
The visual design has psychological impact and creates your image
The front end design is what the user interacts with. Like the body of a car - the body design and color,
the steering wheel, the dashboard and the radio.
This would correspond to navigation, links and other media like Flash,
Videos and Scripted Content like Web 2.0 features.
"Under The Hood" - or the page code. What you don't see can hurt you!
This part can be compared to the motor. A web page is displayed by your browser reading the code below the page.
Outdated page code is rampant on the net and is
hurting millions of web sites still living in the 90's.
A Summary of the Above:
To be truly effective we need to reach a balance between the look and the function - text and graphics. A web site designed solely for search engines is an ugly duckling for the user.
A site that is designed solely for end user "appeal" is crippled in the search engines. Again we need to look east and find a Zen type of balance between interesting web design and search engine optimization.