When you are designing your pages, or have them designed by someone else, it is good to take the following advice in mind:

Design for evolution, not revolution.

The reason behind this is simple. Google doesn’t like big changes. If one day you are no longer pleased by your design, and decide to revolutionize the way it looks, you might get punished in the search results. By “revolutionize” I mean big changes in the way your HTML code makes up the page. An example might be going from a table-based layout to a layout that is not table-based.

If you are already a well-established website, you might get away with this. If you are not, you better not take the risk. I know, because I’ve experienced it first hand. Not that the change was that big, but apparently big enough to trigger a flag in google’s algorithm.

There are a few tricks to avoid catastrophes and they fall into two categories.

First, separate content from style. Do this by using a separate style sheet and put as much in your style as you can. Often, if you want to change the look, you can do this entirely by changing your style sheet. A good example of this is CSS Zen Garden. Eg, if you have a header image or logo, consider placing the image as a background of the header. That way you can change the look by replacing the image reference in your style sheet. There is no resulting HTML change on your page and you don’t risk being punished.

Second, plan possible changes. What new features are there you might want to implement in the feature? Maybe a search function, or a poll? These things don’t require you to turn your pages upside down inside out. One div element might be enough. If you have planned your design with expansion in mind, finding a place for it shouldn’t be a problem. Positioning some elements a bit lower can be done easily through your style sheet. If you have a sidebar, some new things can find a place there.

The bottom line is: think ahead. Small players in the field have it difficult. No reason to make it even harder.

One of the things you’ll have to do at least once for your website is to create a design for it. Now there is a simple method to get incoming links just with your design. Here’s how it goes.

First you browse the web for a great design. Preferably a website that is known a bit and makes good use of web standards. Next you make sure some people know about your great design and some people will notice it is a copy of another. Watch the incoming links as people point to your site as a complete design ripoff. Blame it on the designer you hired. You knew of nothing. People will actually feel sorry for you (and link to you even more for this sad but true story). Redesign your site as you would have done from the beginning. You are forgiven (insert religion disclaimer).

Simple.

I just hope anyone linking to a ripped of design is smart enough not to reward it with an extra link. Use “nofollow”.

There are websites that are designed minimalistic.Take Web Standards Awards as an example. There isn’t really much going on on the frontpage. No ads all over the place, no colums with the latest submissions, user comments and all that stuff.

There are also sites that do have all of this. Take a look at CSS Beauty. Although it also has a clean and nice design, there is much more going: news and announcements, latest gallery, archives links, recommended section, advertisments, job openings, latest discussions, and features.

Why this comparison? Well, when I surf the web for information I always have the impression that the sites with more buzz on their pages are the sites that are more established, have a larger user-base and are more likely have interesting and more things to say I might want to check back for. I don’t know whether this is just me or a general feeling more people have though. If my impression is shared by many people, it would be an advantage to create your site with a little more dynamism in order to have users evaluate your site as more imortant.

Recently Gitte Lindgaard found that “internet users make up their minds about the quality of a website in the blink of an eye”. So even if both types of websites have the same quality of content, they are potentially evaluated differently in the first 50 milliseconds. Speaking for myself and combinig things, I probably judge a site with a “busy” layout as more important in those first few milliseconds.

However I don’t know if I’m alone with this. If this accounts for most people it’s certainly a factor to take into account when designing a site.