Customer Street and UFindUs Web Design

As part of the design and SEO team at Customer Street I have been given the fun job of redesigning the MoreUK directory. You can view the current MoreUK Business Directory Here.

So what do we need to think about ?

These are the main things I will be thinking about when I start drafting up an image of the potential new MoreUK Directory.

The specific pages need to reflect exactly what they are about. This means that if someone completes a search for a plumber in Lancaster, the page needs to reflect in either images or words, both the area and search phrase. This will ensure that the first impressions when a visitor arrives at a page are very specific to what they are looking for.

We need to get everything that is vitally important in the top 600 pixels of the website. It was a shock to me the amount of people who still use 600 x 800 screen resolution so we need to ensure that no matter what resolution the visitor uses that they can see the important information first.

If you are currently using tables of frames to design the layout of your websites then I urge you to learn CSS. CSS is not complicate. Matthew Hadwen wrote an easy to read article about What is CSS ?

• CSS can dramatically reduce the amount of code you use on your website compared to tables making it easier for browsers (IE, Firefox etc.) to display your pages quicker
• The reduced code also means that search engines can find the content of your website quicker and will not find it a chore on your website.
• As all the styles for your website are stored in one file it makes it so much quicker and easier to impliment changes to the whole site.
• More and more styles are being created and alot will reduce the need for adding images on your pages.

Did you know

There are styles available to add drop shadows to boxes ?

For more information on CSS please visit the Customer Street CSS Blog.

Here at Customer Street we like to help our clients fight spam. Quite often though, you will have the nasty spam spiders crawling around your website searching for email addresses that it can harvest. Then, when it returns to it’s master, it will add all the harvested email addresses to the already, large collection before using them for both mail shots and selling to marketing companies.

These spam spiders are tiny pieces of sofware that can dig deep in to your website and HTML code, searching for standard formatted email addresses link (me@mydomain.com). You can minimize the risk by protecting yourself against the spam spiders.

Here are a few solutions

Using the HTML Symbols

To reduce the risk of these spiders getting hold of yor email address you need to try and fool them. The first way we will show you is to use the HTML symbol for the at symbol (@). This is @ So your email address link will look something like

<a href=”mailto:me@mydomain.com”>