Jakob Nielsen just wrote a really good article on designing and using data to back it up. In short he found that 100% of the designers who provided external data were right, whereas 25% of the designers who relied on their personal opinion were right.

This underlines the importance of using data and analytics when you are desinging a web site and in designing in genereal.

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/guesses-data.html

Often overlooked but important is the role of URLs, so going from yoursite.com/?pageid=123&sub12 to yoursite.com/our_services/ not only helps the user verbally say the URL but also the search engines to connect it to something meaningful.

This is even more important when you have product or service pages so going from a URL that looks like yourhotelsite.com/?hotelID123&city123 to yourhotelsite.com/reykjavik/hotel_plaza/ is not only better to communicate but also helps the search engines to connect the URL to search terms in this case Reykjavik and Hotel Plaza.

We could even go further and ad the country to it so something like yourhotelsite.com/Iceland/reykjavik/hotel_plaza/ instead of yourhotelsite.com/?CountryID123&hotelID123&city123, you get me?

So what should you have in mind? Well before you do anything open up Excel and start creating a folder structure, then you might want to do some keyword analysis so that you are choosing the right keywords, then you implement. Simple? Yes and no, what if your CMS system does not support this?

Over to you

The site IcelandGourmetGuide.com made it to the „Best New Websites“ section of Web Users, did not get a full house but three out of four stars, not all bad. Little Web 2.0 options such as interaction with each restaurant, external rating options but beside that, three stars. For me the site looks little one dimensional and as stated in the review „Sadly, the restaurant guide to Reykjavik is disappointingly thin and there‘s nowhere for interested visitors to interact“. I am how sure that the site owners will fix this.

couple of other sites on Iceland:

www.dining.is
www.travelnet.is
www.hotels.is
www.nat.is

I know it is not current, but some of the greatest design I have seen on my travels and or researching on the Internet for London was done by a comany named Templar Downie and promots local historical heros.

The “Local Heroes” campaign devised by Templar Downie extended to Green Park, where the focus was on such UK historical figures as Sir Isaac Newton, Wellington and Queen Victoria.

Really great stuff, visit www.templardownie.com for more information on them.