Checklist for a Mobile Friendly Website

Smartphones have been integrated into our world and how! You can’t turn a corner today and see someone’s head glued to their screen. While the question of where does this lead us as a society is for greater minds, we’re looking at the checklist you need to keep ready to be able to implement a mobile-friendly website. In today’s blog, we’re going to be covering just that topic. Hopefully the end of it, you’ll know exactly what you need in order to have a fully functional mobile-friendly website.

Mobile Friendly Website Checklist

1) Implement Mobile Friendly Design
There are at least 3 ways in which you can serve your customers with a responsive web template. However, out of these 1 is highly recommended by Google and is relatively easy to implement as well. This is by using a responsive design template. The HTML code, the URL shared to the customer is the same in the responsive design template. The other two options that are not ideal, but good to know are, by dynamic serving where you URL shared is the same across the different devices, but the HTML served on each device is slightly altered for the screen. The third option is to use a completely separate URL, one for mobile viewers and the other for web browsing.

2) Structured Data
Using structured data will definitely help Google understand the content on your website. The same applies to your mobile website as well. The pages on your mobile website should have the same structured data that is on your website. Google does mobile first indexing. Keep that in mind.

3) No Flash
Adobe Flash is quite an outdated tool. Some of your favorite games had been built using Flash but in more recent times flash has encumbered websites and makes them slow. More importantly, Chrome automatically disables flash on most sites due to security and speed issues. So it should be pretty obvious to anyone building your mobile website that they should not be using any Flash on your mobile-friendly website. Use JavaScript, CSS or similar other modern properties instead.

4) Font, Buttons, Design Is Important
Another important aspect of ensuring that your website is responsive and mobile friendly is the design architecture of the website itself. Being responsive enough is not enough it should have to be aesthetically pleasing as well. Pay special attention to the fonts. Mobile screens have been steadily growing bigger over the years, but they are still no comparison to screens of your websites and desktops. Fonts that are easily readable on larger screens are not so when using your website on mobile screens. It’s not the same with mobile phones. Buttons themselves can have an impact on your customer experience which can again have an impact on your website SEO.

5) Performance Matters
Apart from the fonts, buttons, design the performance of your mobile responsive website is also of the utmost importance. You have to focus on optimizing your mobile website to give your customers the kind of experience that they have come to expect from your website. There are several ways in which you can optimize your mobile website such as

– Improve your images
– Boost performance by improving the server response time
– Reduce the file size of your uploads by using tools like GZip
– Optimize your CSS

6) Focus On Your Customers
Maybe you won’t be able to display everything your website has to offer on your mobile website. That can be irrelevant. Your mobile website can be the platform that gives customers exactly what they need when they need it. Mobile users are normally looking for information on the go and they need accurate information quickly. If you are able to serve it to them through your mobile website then your customers will be dependent on you. Optimize the content for your users and you’ll almost have the battle won.

Conclusion
Having a mobile website can be easy but ensuring that you develop a mobile-friendly website that looks good, delivers on the design, content, and experiential aspects to the customers is not a piece of cake. You can do so by hiring the best web design and development company. If you’re looking to hire a professional web design company get in touch with us today.

Things To Consider When Building An E-Commerce Website

From relying on mega online e-commerce websites like Amazon and E-Bay many companies are now focusing on building their own e-commerce sites to directly try and tap their customers. In the last couple of years, we’ve seen a significant rise in the number of websites that are selling products online and with good reason. If you have some products you’d like to sell, it’s better to focus on developing an e-commerce website from scratch. You’ll have more control over the products you sell, the customers you are targeting and you have greater control over the pricing of the products. But if you’ve decided to build a website or are thinking about getting a professional e-commerce website development team, here is a checklist that you should be aware of.

Guidelines for E-Commerce Website Development

1. Understand the customer and product
Don’t build a website simply because you want to have an online presence without the customer base of the product that will sell online. There are plenty of products that have a higher propensity to sell offline than through online sales to ensure that you’ve made the right choice in going ahead for an e-commerce website development. If you need additional advice you can always get in touch with the best website development company in your area.

2. Choosing the right platform
Once you’ve decided to come online the next question becomes which platform to use and there is plenty of e-commerce website platform to choose from. You can either go with Hybris, Magento, WooCommerce, Shopify or even consider building your website from scratch using HTML, Java, and CSS. What you need to keep in mind, especially if you have a sizeable user base is to make sure you have
– A functioning customer relationship management tool to handle all their requirements
– A payment gateway integration to make paying for your products simpler
– Strong backend which can support your frontend activities
– Mobile responsiveness for all pages

3. Website Hosting Provider
Once you’ve decided which platform you want to choose the next choice to be made is the hosting provider you will go with. Now you may think that all host provide the same services, but in our multiple years of experience in website development and web design, we’ve seen that some services, although priced identically, have vastly different service levels. If you need more details on hosting providers for your website please feel free to get in touch with us.

Here are some things to keep in mind while selecting your hosting provider
– Speed is of the essence. Google rewards sites that provide data to the customers faster with a better ranking
– Choose a hosting provider that will make sure your site is available to the customer at all times. There should be zero or very marginal downtimes
– Since you will be dealing a lot with sensitive customer data, privacy and security or a concern. Make sure you choose a hosting provider that keeps your site protected at all times
– In case there is any issue you want to make sure that your hosting provider is there to support you at all times. Choose a host that has good service staff to support you.
– You might be starting off small but you should be able to build your website as you go so scalability in terms of server size, space, and reliability are always important

4. Choosing what you want your customer to see
Another important aspect of an e-commerce website development project is to make sure you know exactly what pages you’ll be showing to your customers. How easy the website is to navigate? Are the images too cluttered? These may not seem like important factors when building an e-commerce website but they are all very relevant not only to your customer but to Google as well.

Conclusion
If you use e-commerce platforms like WooCommerce and Shopify you might be able to develop an e-commerce website yourself, but without the help of professional reliable web development and design company, your website won’t have the much-needed fascination to the public. If you want someone to professionally build your e-commerce website, get in touch with us today.

Why Image Optimization Is Relevant For Google Search Rankings

Most websites nowadays have tens of thousands of images. Some as a means to impress their prospective customers and some as means to display what their products and services could look like. While having a lot of images can be used to attract customers they can also slow down your website. On the other hand, images can also be optimized to improve the SEO for your website. We’ll be taking a look at what image optimization is and why it matters for your website SEO and Google Search Rankings.

What Is Image Optimization?
Image optimization is the process by which an image with the right message you’re hoping to deliver is published on your website in the right dimensions (height and width) as well as the right size (file size). It is important to note than larges images will require more space on the server as long as taking more time to be delivered to the customer. The better the optimization the better the customer experience will be. Another step in image optimization is to insert the right image alt tags on all the images. We’ll look into why that’s relevant a little later.

Why Image Optimization Is Important For Your SEO?

1. Using Relevant Imagery
Using the right images in the right place is very important for your website SEO. Let’s get this out of the way very quickly so that we can focus on how to optimize images for your website. Image search is really important. More than 6 out of 10 customers do an image search at least once a day. On your website if you’re using an image of a monkey but describing a cat it does not make a lot of sense, does it? This may seem like common sense but when you’re talking about obscure concepts like hard work and imagination what kind of imagery you use is totally up to you.

2. Alt Tags
The most important bit about image optimization is probably using the right alt-tags in the images. Just like website pages have SEO titles and headlines to make it easier to search, images have alt-tags to be able to find them more easily. Now you have think it’ll be easy to fool Google and try and use your business keyword on your images, which is fair but don’t overdo it or you will be penalized.

3. Using The Right Linking
Images on your website can also be used to link to pages and other images. Use the linking feature on images to take your customer on a journey throughout your website. As you probably know the more time a customer spends on your website the higher Google ranks your website in search. If you have the correct images linking to the right pages to take your customer to exactly where he wants to go then you will kill two birds with one stone, by improving your ranking and improving your sales.

4. Use Proper File Names
Ensuring that you use proper file names on your images is just a way to ensure that you maintain good hygiene on your website. Using file names like DSC00192.jpg is not at all helpful either too Google or your customer. If the image is taking time to load he can see the filename and at least understand if it’s relevant to them. If not, they can move to a different image. Having a proper file name also helps a search engine saving it in a relevant repository.

Conclusion
Do you need help in optimizing the images on your site for better SEO scores? Get in touch via email or leave a comment below and we’ll get in touch with you immediately. We’ve helped a number of our clients improve their SEO rankings simply by optimizing the images best suited for their website. Get in touch today!