When creating the website for your new business it is easy to find yourself in a battle between style and substance. On one hand you want a strong visual element to your site that will catch your potential clients attention. An obvious ‘cool’ factor to your website will generate buzz as people share your link to show their friends and business associates. On the other hand, strong content is critical to the life of your website. It is no secret that the search engines search the content on your page and based upon the strength of it rank your website accordingly. Plus the text will explain to your potential clients exactly what it is your business offers quicker than strong graphics.
It is obvious you need a good balance of both elements, but in what measures? Consider the information that is immediately viewable on your computer monitor (without needing to scroll down the page). In that viewable area needs to be strong elements of both style and substance.
For SEO purposes, Flash animation gets a bad wrap. This is because it is impossible for the text crawlers sent out by Google and other search engines to read it. However, it is an effective way to draw a clients eye affordably. Consider a flash banner at the top of your page with some simple animation to get the viewer involved with your page. Avoid animation that takes more than a few seconds to load. If viewers have to wait a long time for the flash to load they will quickly assume your site is ‘broken’ and move on to another site.
Designers will sometimes make the mistake of putting the relevant text down below the page fold just to give the search engines something to crawl. But strong text is also very important to sell your client on your services so it is necessary to have good solid copy ready to be easily digested. Bullet points are a great way to get your point across quickly, with the individual bullet points being links to more relevant copy on the subject. At that point, once you have piqued the readers interest enough to follow a link you can expound in detail on your service using all the strong relevant content that you have created to sell your product or service.