Why Website Maintenance Should Be On Your Mind

Responsive web design put simply is a website that responds to whatever device it is viewed on, that could be a desktop computer, laptop, tablet, phone or watch.

If you had a website designed before 2011-2012 your website is probably not responsive, and this could mean you are losing out on customers & sales.

Reason being is that over 50% of internet searches are now done on mobile phones and tablets (iPads) and if your website is not responsive it will not show well on those devices and your potential customers will leave your site and go and find one they can read properly.

The good news is that Graphic Lux designs all websites to be responsive, and we can help you convert your site today!

5 reasons why you must have a responsive website

Early in 2013, Google announced their AdWords migration to Enhanced Campaigns, which is resulting in advertisers being automatically “opted-in” to tablet advertising. What has this meant for our clients? The need for a website that works on a variety of devices and screen sizes.

While the Google AdWords Enhanced Campaigns transition is a great reason for our clients to begin to develop responsive websites, there are many other benefits to a responsive website as well. Here are the top five reasons for updating your website to leverage responsive website design.

Competitive Edge

Responsive design is still in its infancy, and not many people have taken advantage of this highly effective technology. If your company is considering updating its brand presence, explore the advantages of responsive design. Chances are, your competitors have not yet embraced it, but you definitely should!

Your prospective customers will get a much better experience on your site, and are more likely to convert – whether that conversion is filling out a form, or making a purchase. This opens the door for your company to reach more customers, more effectively.

Flexibility

Do you know the size of your mobile phone screen? What about the screen size of the mobile phone you had five years ago? Screen sizes are constantly changing—and we see this not only in phones, but in desktops and tablets as well.

As new devices and displays are developed, screen sizes are constantly changing. With a responsive website, you do not need to spend your valuable marketing and IT resources on updating your site for new devices. Instead, your website will be displayed based on the size of the screen – looking great on screens of any size.

Save Time (and Money).

When you build a responsive website, the site is the same across all devices. However, using CSS media queries, you are able to adjust elements for a given screen size. Though this sounds complicated in a technical sense, it provides a great time-and-money-saving benefit to marketers. Make a change once, and it is reflected across all devices.

Consistent Look & Feel

Fonts, color schemes, button styles and imagery. With a responsive website, you are able to provide your users with the benefit of one, consistent user experience. Whether a user is coming to your website to shop, or to research an enterprise software, the simpler you can make their experience, the better.

Google, Google, Google (Did we mention Google?)

When Google makes a recommendation, you better take it seriously. When Google recommends something, we should probably listen. On the Google Developers website, “Google recommends webmasters follow the industry best practice of using responsive web design, namely serving the same HTML for all devices and using only CSS media queries to decide the rendering on each device.” Google actually recommends that developers leverage responsive design and development techniques when building their websites.

Why would Google make such a recommendation? Responsive websites provide a better, more consistent user experience – plus, many experts suggest that Google prefers responsive sites, as they are easier to crawl (overall, resulting in search engine optimization benefits).

If a new website is a part of your marketing initiatives, consider making the change to Responsive Website Design. This is a technology that is not expected to go anywhere, and will help ensure that your company’s website is up-to-date in regards to technology for the next few years.

You can be a jack of all trades, master of nothing. That being said, it is  impossible to find a single person capable of mastering web design and web development at the highest level, it just doesn’t exist. What does exist are strong teams with members specializing in each area, this is what you want to find.

Below is a review of each of these core areas and what the various team members of your to-be web development design & development company should be able to deliver.

Development:

Evaluating a web development company can be hard, especially when you have three or more choices in front of you. To make it even harder, you are essentially assuming the companies you are interviewing will write ‘good code’, (and you’re thinking… “what does that even mean?”).

Below is a simple check list of items you should expect a quality Buffalo, NY Web Design & Development Company, like Graphic Lux, to deliver:

1 – Cross Browser Compatibility: This simply means that the developer will write code in such a manner that it will properly display your website in all major web browsers. The current industry standard is to support all modern versions of Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explore version 9 and beyond.

2 – W3C Compliant CSS: W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) is the major organization that sets web development standards and CSS (cascading style sheets) is the method which all modern websites should use to style any website. In plain English, you want a web company that states they follow the W3C standards for CSS. This proves that your design will render correctly on all modern browsers and most mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones.

3 – Table-less HTML: As web standards evolve to improve stability and security, so does your web development team. Unfortunately, some teams get stuck in the past and have refuse to adopt new industry standards. In the past, developers would use tables (basically a spreadsheet) to structure website pages. This has long been past as industry practice and should not be followed any longer. Any good web development company structures and styles website pages with CSS now. The moral of the story? Do not hire a web developer who codes your entire website with HTML tables.

4 – Responsive Design: Over the past few years smartphones and tablet devices have been widely adopted by consumers and this trend will continue. While we all love our mobile devices, it presents a particular challenge for developers due to varying screen resolutions. Having a responsive web design solves this problem by allowing your website to automatically adjust to different screen resolutions. Having a responsive design will become more and more important and market penetration for smartphones and tablets continue to grow. However, note that most web design companies do charge extra for responsive designs because of the extra time involved in creating extra designs and code for these various screen designs. To recap, make sure you have a team who will ensure your website is cross browser compatible, is W3C compliant, uses table-less HTML and who can offer you responsive web design if it is within your budget.

Design:

There are two major things that the team you choose must be able to master.

1. Being able to craft a web design with visual aesthetics and creativity.
2. Ensuring the design is user centric for you, the client.

First and foremost, you should be proud of your new website and how brilliant it looks. It is your online store front and furthermore, it is essential representation of you and your company. Your website serves as the catalysts to all practical purposes within your business. It is your virtual replacement in the online world. Since you can’t physically talk to a person while on your website, your design (and content) is the one who will be doing all the talking. Additionally, having a stellar web design helps build user confidence and desire. It is like the difference between walking into a second hand computer store to buy a new home computer versus stepping into a sexy, exhilarating Apple retail store. The ‘experience’ of your website, in large, is created by design.

So, we arrive at the conclusion that a smart web design is worth it’s weight in gold (or a sizable check). Hire a web design company that has an excellent past portfolio which is similar in taste to what you expect for your company or organization. Second, design is more than a pretty face, it is about usability. By usability, I mean a website this is highly functional and easy to navigate, where a user can quickly find the answer to his or her questions. Keep in mind every user that enters a google search and thus stumbles upon your website, is searching for the answer to a problem. While they might take an extra second to window shop if your website design looks fancy, it will not hold them there long. More to the point, it is highly valuable to have a sexy looking site (a pretty face so to speak), but that value drops nearly to zero, instantly most times in the eye of a user if he/she can not find the information (solve the problem) being sought after.

For this very reason, I would argue that if you had to choose between the two, err on the side of having a website that is slightly more functional than it is sexy. Furthermore, your company should put a reasonable amount of time and resources into the generation, organization and upkeep of your company’s content.

Conclusions:

The market, as it has always been, if full of above average, average and below average vendors. Hopefully, by implementing some of the topics we have discussed thus far, you can find and select the above average vendor to become your company’s long-term web design & development company of choice.

If you’ve been on the internet for any length of time or even if you’re a complete newbie you should know the importance of traffic to your business. You may also know that it’s not the wisest thing to “buy” traffic, because once the money runs out, so will the traffic. So how do you get traffic that is so integral to your business? Traffic that’s continuous and best of all free? YouTube can help you with this.

YouTube offers many opportunities for promotion and getting traffic to your site as it has the power to increase your rankings considerably. Just take a look at any Google page and you’ll notice that most times the videos are usually ranked at the top of the page. Here’s why. One, YouTube is owned by Google and they work together. Two, YouTube is the second largest search engine next only to Google. That should be enough motivation to make you want go and create your own YouTube channel and upload videos to it.

But don’t go rushing off to create just yet. Let’s make sure you’re doing this the right way first so you don’t waste your time. Take note of these tips:

Make your profile interesting

YouTube is just like any other social site. So you want to create an interesting profile for networking purposes. People will want to know more about you if they like your videos. This can help build trust among your audience, thus giving you greater traffic. Try to make your profile interesting enough to get across to everyone. Professionally it shouldn’t be too boring or too stuffy. But informally it shouldn’t be too hyped either.

Promote your videos

You won’t get much traffic without viewers. You can’t just post your videos and expect that viewers will automatically find them no matter how good you think they are. You have to promote them. You can put them on your blog or on any of your other social sites.

Use your keyword in the title of your videos

People find your videos when they do searches via the search engines and on Youtube so you should make it as easy as possible for them to find you. I mean you do want to get traffic right? Okay, you should include your major keyword or keyword phrase in the title and in the description. Don’t just put it there though, it should feel natural and make sense. And don’t forget to put them in the tags either.

Know when to post your videos

On the internet timing is everything, you need to know when to do what. So with YouTube it’s no different, it has its peak and off-peak times for traffic. Thursday mornings or early afternoons US time is considered the best day and time to post a video of general interest. Wednesdays is said to be another good day. You need to pay attention to the loading times of your videos as well. Start early for those with internet connectivity issues and for large videos if you want them uploaded in the prime time slots.

There’s approximately an hour of video being uploaded to YouTube every second. This makes it a valuable resource to drive traffic to your site and promote it. However despite the obvious competition, if you consistently produce quality videos with time you’ll reap the benefits of your effort which is to build traffic.

By Tom Denton