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The Emperor’s New Clothes

Written by webdesigner on January 26th, 2010

Hans Andersen’s brilliant story relates how two rogues pretending to be weavers approached a foolish Emperor saying that they could create the most beautiful garments ever made in the world. So they were hired to weave the Emperor some new clothes.

The rogues made gestures and pretended to weave with pretend thread on empty looms. They told everyone who visited them that the material was magical – it could be seen by all apart from those who were foolish or unfit for their office.  Now of course no-one wanted to admit to either being a fool or unfit for his or her office therefore everyone remarked how beautiful the cloth was. What marvellous colours, magnificent shades of yellow and red, green and blue – and even how as you looked at the garments the colours changed. No-one had seen anything so beautiful before.  The more people said it was beautiful the more lavish the claims became. Even the Emperor was unable to deny the amazing beauty of the fabric.

Now when the clothes were finished the Emperor held a procession through his Kingdom and paraded naked believing that in fact he was wearing his new clothes and that everyone could see them apart from him.

But of course an innocent child looking at the emperor exclaimed “But the Emperor has nothing on at all” and all the people realised their folly. But the Emperor unable to stop was forced to parade naked before all his people and had no choice but to carry on head held high.

Now it seems to me that an awful lot of Search engine optimisation (SEO) and SEO claims are a little like the Emperors new clothes.

If you have a poor website with very little content of relevance then all the SEO in the world will not make it good.

The innocent visitor will not be taken in by all the hype – they will instantly see that the website has nothing in it at all.

The SEO is just empty looms with empty thread.

There is really only one way to ensure that your website ranks well on Google and that you are not misleading people by selling the Emperor some new clothes. Make a great website – full of relevant, well written content. Ensure that the site is properly put together up to the highest standards of coding outlined by W3C. Ensure that the site is navigable and that you have relevant titles to pages.

Start with the information of your site – by analysing it to ensure that the site is well put together and that you have some sort of information hierarchy. Then create a design that illuminate the information – getting the message you want across rather than something that looks nice but is not on message.

Images in the site should also inform the content and not just be there for decoration.

I recently reviewed a site where half of the screen area of each page was taken up by an image – it is off putting – what is the motivation to scroll? Even if the copy is good I would suggest that this site is wearing a different set of clothes from the site that has nothing in it but loads of SEO. These clothes rather than enhancing the body obscure it.   

If you want to produce a website that is worthy of your company, then you are going to need to have some sort of information analysis process in place. A web brochure on its own is unlikely to sell very much at all these days.

If you want your site to be more than the Emperors new clothes then you need to take it seriously and build a brilliant site with good design and good content.

There is no other method that will do the trick.

At Ariadne Designs we can help you with both the information architecture of your site and the design – getting both right is what is vital to the success of your site – not only on Google but to your users.

John Howson is a director of Ariadne Designs Ltd and has been involved in web design and development since 1996.
He is a published author and has a personal interest in environment and development.

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