Standards design works!
Recently we were in a unique and fortunate position to see the power of standards compliant design in action.
One of our clients, who already had an established website (built by another company), asked us to build a duplicate site using exactly the same content (text and images) but with a different design. This was to see how the two sites would compete as our client was considering the direction of his business on the web.
We installed some analytical software onto both sites which produced some fantastic metrics. In just one month the site we built brought in over 2000% more visitors and importantly over 3000% more referrals from search engines, even though the domain was not known or publicised!
The original website
The domain name of the existing site was printed on all of our client's publicity materials and listed in directories - our new site was not. The other difference was that the website we built is accessible and standards compliant, the existing one was not. The chart below shows visitor figures for a typical month (November 2007 in this case) on the original site.
The image above shows how the original site received few visits and was not well indexed by search engines. Google for example was responsible for only around 50% of site visits.
The new Standards Compliant site
Search engines can index standards compliant websites much more easily than poorly designed websites. This modern design approach allows key words and phrases to be found more readily. This is why our client was receiving much more traffic from the site we built (even though the content was the same - literally) and for some relevant searches was appearing in position number 1 in Google. For other searches the site was positioned on page one of the Google results.
This second image (above) shows statisitcs from the website built by Make Hay. Overall traffic is increased (by 2300%) with a much greater number of visitors finding the site through Organic Google search.
Needless to say our client ditched their old website and design company and we're now working with them to further improve their visitor traffic.
If you have a site built by us then it is already standards compliant but it is likely that there are further improvements we can make by analysing your visitor activities as we are for the client in this article.
How standards design can help you
If you are one of our Green Hosting or Make Mail clients whose website was built elsewhere then you may want to consider having your site re-built to meet accessibility design standards.
Of course accessibility isn't just about search engine optimisation, its about being a responsible website owner. Read our information about accessibility to find out more.
Contact us to discuss your website and how we can work together to improve your visitor traffic.