What is a responsive web design?

A responsive website automatically alters itself to be seen and searched easily on whatever product it is being accessed by. You have tablets, phones, Macs and pc’s. All these products offer the consumer different kinds of viewing experiences. A static site will not alter it’s appearance and likely be too large for an iphone and also may suffer the same issues with various tablets and alternative browsers too. Here are the three ways you can have a responsive website set up for your business by your  web design company:

Have a website built from the ground up to be completely responsive to iPhones, iPads and any other technology that is likely to access it. Due to the fact you are building the site from the ground up it is easier to make small alterations should you need to tweak certain aspects of your site to make it perfectly accessible to a portal.

For those on a tighter budget you can simply purchase a pre made template design that has been built to be responsive. I would say that you will end up with a product that is 85 – 90% responsive most of the time with this strategy. Most of the common tablets and smart phones will be covered here. The only real issue is that you will have to pay extra for anyone to make the delicate tweaks required should the site not be accessible responsively on a product like you would with a totally bespoke design.

You can build a mobile, tablet and pc/mac version of your site. This is really expensive, though is most likely to be accurate in its responsiveness to as wide a product set as is possible.

The power of Apps

It is worth remembering that apps are incredibly important and should be invested in as a business should your budget allow it. Having a potential client or customer find you through a simple app click is incredibly powerful. The better and more useful/intriguing your application, the more people will download it to help them when they are in need of a product or service that you supply. Apps will be designed to be able to be accessed through mobile, tablet or desk top appliances.

Are you getting it yet?

There are likely to be over 100 million Apple products sold in 2013 alone. Add Android to this and the various other players out there and you have a massive market place that your website needs to be seen in. Your potential clientele don’t want to waste time trying to get your site to fit a screen so they can see it. Getting a website to be easily accessible across the whole spectrum of smart technologies has never been easier. You really do not have any excuse….unless you are not interested in tapping into that potential.  Put your website in mobile gear for the next generation of websites to appear!

Please leave your comments below.  You can also see a beautiful representation of mobile enabled web templates here:  Fully Responsive iPhone Themes. 

All websites should be designed in a fully responsive manner, or on responsive templates. This means that a website is accessible through any medium, be it a Smart Phone or a soon to be on the market wrist watch. A responsive design allows the site to fit the screen of the products that is being used to surf the web automatically. There is a high degree of accuracy by doing a one size fits all design, though this will have various hiccups at times due to that same one size fits all strategy.

Design separate sites for mobiles. This approach involves designing sites that will fit and function for specific products. Mobile phones and tablets for example. This is more expensive, but ultimately the end result is designs and products that are exact matches for the products that will be being used. The likelihood of any “hiccups” is therefore severely reduced.

What about the SEO?

The search engine listings on phones, tablets and PC’s are exactly the same. If you are the top of the search engines for a particular term, you will be at the top of the searches on all products that can access them. This means that websites need to be optimized correctly, with quality content and a solid PR strategy to be able to rank. It just means that now you have so many alternative items that can find those searches. This is an obvious reason as to why online shopping and product/service sourcing is so popular, it is so easy and widely available.

What Of The Future?

What we are seeing in Derby, is that agencies are automatically providing fully responsive website designs to their clients, with the added option of individually designed products to fit certain product mediums exactly. SEO is of course a major part of the whole strategy as is advertising and social media promotion. The good thing for Derby businesses and indeed businesses all over the UK and the world, is that there are so many different ways for the public to get onto the search engines, that the target traffic for them will likely increase for a good while yet.

We will do our best to keep you updated on SEO as firms explore the possibilities that smartphones present.

If you are just starting a website or a blog, you will quickly learn how effective and necessary back links are.  Some people sell and buy back links which is obviously giving sites competitive advantages.  But this I believe is not fair.  Google PR is exchanged as a “value” system.  Websites that have a higher Google PR or Page Rank will be able to sell links from their site to yours.  This isn’t how I believe the web-rating system should be run.  I believe that Google would congruently agree with me when I say that quality, sustained content building, and natural back links are a key determiner in a websites authority.

Explaining The Problem:

The problem presented with PR and Page Rank is a dilemma that Google battles with each day.  This dilemma involves sites that have high page rank but honestly don’t deserve it.  Google’s last update dubbed “Panda” did a great job at getting rid of authority that was not properly distributed among certain websites.  Many of my sites were effected and I have learned a lot!  One thing you should always keep in mind is never trust just a “SEO Ninja.”  They could easily damage your websites to a sever dimension.  Since graduation of the “school of hard knocks” in SEO, i’ve learned a lot.  First of all, never buy links.  This isn’t natural and makes for a messy looking internet!  Google wants a clean index of websites and because of this,  they give authority to websites.  Some high PR sites decide to sell links because they have a high PR rating.  This gives a site credibility, but this credibility is paid for.  This credibility isn’t an honest reflection of the site’s true authority!

Buying links is like paying for reviews on your business, obviously those paid-reviews are not real and thus do not truly reflect the real feedback that that business should have.  So how can a search engine giant like Google really make an algorithm that takes into consideration “real” feedback, not “paid” feedback?  I am not an all-knowing Google guru but I believe that there is an answer to this problem.

The Way I Believe It Should Work:

Google should still have PR and Page Rank, however they need to update it differently.  The deciding factors on a sites authority or PR need to change.  These changes would eliminate the unnatural link-spam that seems to highly populate the internet each day.

These changes would greatly help Googles anti-spam and positive PR calculation efforts:

• Page Time – Give each back link a rating based on the time spent on that certain page.  This would eliminate people faking massive amounts of ping traffic.  Each unique IP would be tracked for the time that was spent on that page.  If the page linking out had a natural time spent on it, any links from that page would be given a higher PR and thus would count towards the sites PR if you had that link.  Essentially it would be giving link juice where it was truly deserving.  But this obviously isn’t the only deciding factor that Google should use when determining a sites authority and PR.
• Link-Out Time – Google should link-juice of each link based on the time an outgoing visitor spends on the article that they link to.  For example, I recently got a link from TheNextWeb.  Many people spent time on their article reading it, hence that article would be given a higher PR potential.  However to actually pass “juice” onto a back link, people would have to follow that outgoing link and spend time on that link also.  This would help content creators and bloggers build content that people linking too really appreciate.  If I get a link from TheNextWeb, and people spend a considerable amount of time after visiting that link and the article on TheNextWeb site had considerable traffic, social signals, and traffic time then link juice and PR would be passed on to that site.  If Google did this, it would make it incredibly difficult for people to fake their PR,  spam their PR, etc.
• Alexa Rating – Google should really think about implementing value on traffic.  If a site gets a lot of traffic that has a solid duration time, then a level of authority would be passed!
• Page Relevancy – Google already does this, however they need to update the methods used by the system.  Google needs to add script that can decide a page’s relevancy by it’s content not only by the site linking, but the actual words inside the article that links out.  Google does this normally, but they need to make a few improvements that could enhance the search experience and provide PR that is honest to that sites actual authority.  This is really what Google wants.
• Root Domain Authority – After Google updates its PR to actually reflect a real websites influence then it needs to use this PR as a decider of a links authority.  But obviously the sites that have huge PR but low traffic would be manually updated via Google.  Google would basically have a fee minions go over the site to see if its selling links, or unnaturally building content.  Then a Google team member would take manual action on those sites that may have question.  After these slight changes described, PR could still be used as an authority deciding factor in the future.

Summary:

Google needs to asses a websites PR, Page Rank, and authority on a level of dimensions that must be met.  Back links should only count if they have good traffic time, link-out time, Alexa rank, page relevancy, and root domain authority.  I believe that this would remove the issues that plague Google as it makes its best attempt to ensure proper Page Rank authority allocation.

What do you think?  If you believe that this would be a smart way for Google to update its PR calculation system please SHARE.

Share us your thoughts on our Facebook Page: Vault Feed Facebook.  Thanks for reading this article on Google’s Next Page Rank Update.