Eric A. Taub of the NY Times wrote a fantastic article on November 15 in the business section of The New York Times titled ‘How to Make Your Web Site Sing for You.’ His article clearly explains that there are two key ingredients to making a website successful for your business. The first ingredient is a professional design that conveys a quick, clear message, and second, that your website must be compatible with search engines if you expect anyone to ever find your website.

It certainly sounds simple enough, you need a good design that is search engine friendly. What I find interesting, actually more frustrating (being in the project management role between the two) is that you often find yourself sacraficing one thing for the other. Designers just don’t like to hear that they should design with stock PC font because the one they used will need to be converted to HTML hypertext anyhow in order for a search engine to ever find that text content. Furthermore, designers hate hearing about how their beatiful, fashionable, color coordinated navigation needs to be coded in HTML rather than flash so that search engines can find it, read it, and follow it. Coders and SEOs on the other hand typically don’t care about the design at all, if left up to them every page would be left stark white, with black text, the web would again look as it did in 1994. I feel as if SEOs have about as much style sense as your average account. Don’t take this the wrong way, I am an SEO and I love my accountant, but he is creative in a different way!

What makes this harder is that the client is usually in agreement with the web designer for the simple reason that their design looked best before it had been converted to a spiderable, indexable webpage and the client rarely takes the time to understand why their webpage, in order to be optimized, can not end up looking like their 8.5 x 11 print brochure.

Ultimately this leaves the search engine specialist in a compromised position, causing he or she to fall short on delivering what could have been possible. I suppose this is ok, if the client understands what they are compromising.

I know in reality the burden here is on us to design the best compromise possible but the engines need to pick up some of the slack on this.

CharterWave is the world’s first portal designed to educate vacationers about private yacht charters. This site will host an active yacht charter blog, a free visitor charter forum, and a wealth of information for new comers. Some informaton will be free and some available after becoming a member.

ChaterWave’s founder Kim Kavin is an award-winning journalist recognized as one of the world’s top yacht charter experts. She is the former executive editor of Yachting and the current charter/cruising editor of Power & Motoryacht, the leading boating magazine in the United States for nearly a decade.

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