B&B Web Design Mistakes: #1 Images of text instead of real textWebsite designs have to walk the fine line between what looks good and what shows up well in search engines. A talented designer can make a site that looks good and shows up well, but not all of them do. Unfortunately, the web is littered with sites that look great, but won't get found by a search engine. They were designed by professionals and amateurs alike. The main reason is they were not created by someone who kept your needs in mind throughout the whole design and development process. Your needs are clear:
Think of a search engine as free advertising. Search engines can bring you a large amount of visitors if only your site can be found. Spider - reads words and follows links to report back to the search engine. Search engines employ programs called "spiders" whose job it is to crawl along pages of the web and report back to the search engine what they have found. Spiders are real simple in what they do. In fact, they can only do three things:
Spiders aren't impressed by the visual part of your website. All they can see is text and links. They can not see pictures. They thrive on words. So with this knowledge, we run into one of the most common mistakes found on B&B websites. Pictures of words! Spiders can't read pictures of words. If they can't read it, they can't report back to the search engine with anything useful. If the search engine has nothing useful recorded about your page, it won't get found by someone using the search engine to choose a B&B to visit. Here are two examples, one is real text, the other is a picture.
Here are some other examples of text compared to pictures of text that should be avoided whenever possible (and it is nearly always possible).
So the question is, why do designers continue to use pictures of text in place of real text? The answer has many possibilities:
Advice for B&B web design
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