When you see fancy websites created by movie studios and large corporations online, you might feel overwhelmed, thinking your own site should look that way. While these sites may draw a great deal of traffic, it’s important to remember that people are drawn to them because of a brand name or specific product – not necessarily because of the content of the site. If you’re just getting started as a website owner, don’t underestimate the value of a simple website. Simple, easy to produce sites can easily pull in traffic – and possibly revenue – if you keep the following guidelines in mind:

HTML only sites are simple and SEO friendly

When it comes to simple and easy, there’s nothing quite like a simple HTML site that includes keyword-rich text and links other relevant pages. Aside from being the most basic kind of website that you can create, these pages are also the only ones that a search engine can navigate. Unfortunately, if you add frames, javascript, or other menu elements, the search engine will not be able to crawl each page on your site and index it properly. As a result, your page rank may be much lower than that of a simple HTML page.

Simple HTML sites can be created with many free tools

Today, almost every web hosting service includes some type of HTML editor. Because adding links and new pages are fundamental to building a website, they all include these functions. Therefore, even if you have never created a website before, you can easily build large sites using the most basic HTML tags to accomplish your goals. You can even practice on these services for free before you begin your own site by signing up for a Yahoo Geocities account and launching their site builder.

Adding increased functionality to simple websites

Of course, there will be times when you want to add more complicated items like shopping carts, photo albums, and guest books to your website. While each of these items requires complex scripts to create, they’re all designed to run on a simple HTML page. Therefore, you won’t need to worry about compatibility issues. You can find thousands of free scripts online that can be added to your site by copying and pasting the code into the appropriate pages – so you don’t even need to worry about writing the script.

There’s no question that we’d all like to have award-winning websites, complete with all the whistles and bells available today. However, it’s also very important to make sure that consumers and search engines can navigate your site easily and efficiently. Consequently, if you want to get the maximum benefit from a small- to medium-sized website, your best option is to use the simplest HTML tags that you can find.

As you learn more about website development, you’ll probably find that you want to experiment with different methods and more complex design techniques. When you do get to this point, it’s important to remember to keep an eye on the page rank and web traffic for your sites. Surprisingly enough, you may find that your simple HTML websites are more likely to outperform the complicated ones across the board.