I wrote a recent article entitled, Mobile-Friendly Is Not Enough. The concept of a mobile friendly website was the reason why this blog was formed more than five years ago. The wisdom at that time supported the notion that a single URL should deliver an appropriate Web page whatever the device being used. The idea suggested in this blog was that a multi-web practice would be better than the One Web Principle which was the goal of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
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Perhaps the title reminds you of that old cartoon labeled, Look Mom No Hands, where the young boy bravely rides his bicycle with both hands in the air. In some versions there is a follow-up where he proclaims, Look Mom No Teeth.
This post may possibly represent the same kind of risky behavior. It stems from that outside-in view that we are now applying to websites. Frequent readers of this blog may not notice any difference. The blog Home page has always included only a single post and this post looks exactly the same. The only way of spotting the difference is by looking at the address field at the top of your browser. Although you may have followed a link to the domain, http://www.staygolinks.com/, you will note that the link displayed there is now the permalink for this particular single post. For quick reference, we will call this the LMNHP approach, not to be confused with the Lucknow Muzaffarpur National Highway Project.
Not having a Home Page brings a number of advantages. If you write a particularly good blog post, it will often perform well in keyword listings. This is helped because Google factors in the recency of new web pages by giving them a higher ranking in the search engine results page (SERP). What you may have noticed if you did a keyword search to spot new blog posts, is that often the first entry shown by Google is the Home page of the blog rather than the specific blog post. As further blog posts when written push that particular blog post off the Home Page, then a keyword search will some time later show the correct blog entry as the appropriate entry rather than the blog Home Page.
Part of the reason for this is that the blog Home page has many back links or inlinks pointing to it which causes it to outrank new blog posts which have very few links. This after all is the fundamental principle of the Google search algorithm. The Home page has the highest PageRank and other web pages have lower values. Indeed if they are very recent, they may not even have a value assigned.
This blog has now changed the balance by immediately redirecting visitors who visit the website to a web page which shows only the latest blog entry. This is a permanent 301 redirection, which should ensure that any inlink to this web page are correctly assigned to it rather than to the website as a whole.
You may wonder why there should be a permanent redirection when this latest post will only be on the front page for a little while, perhaps days or even hours. The thinking here is that for a little while the most important web page on the website is the latest blog entry. It will be assigned back links, some of which are intended for that particular blog post, rather than for the website as a whole. Indeed for a blog this is probably true in the majority of cases. Once the latest post has become a previous post, then it may receive additional back links from other sources as normally happens.
Knowing what I wanted to do, i.e. not have a homepage, I decided to bounce my crazy idea off two of my fellow Cre8asite Forums moderators, Donna Fontenot and Pierre Far. Pierre who is a wizard in these matters in a trans-Atlantic chat session, rapidly came up with a solution. He suggested that the best way was to modify the front end of the index.php file in my blog theme. His solution worked like a charm. It is shown in the image below. The new code surrounded by the yellow rectangle is inserted within the first instruction in the index.php file.
If in your theme, you use a home.php file rather than having the index.php file produce the Home page, then the code should be inserted there.
There would seem to be no downsides on this LMNHP approach and the upside is that rather than creating a homepage with a high PageRank, you spread out those PageRank contributions over individual blog posts as they are created.
If anyone has concerns about this approach, then it would be most useful to have them mentioned in comments here. Equally if you feel there are distinct advantages to this approach, then your contributions would be most appreciated
This approach seems to be performing well in the SERPs and producing higher search engine rankings.
The concept of looking Outside In on almost anything brings to mind a whole series of possible issues. Here are just some:
Outside In has now been suggested as an approach in thinking about customer service in organizations. What counts is how the customer perceives what is being done for them.
It very much relates to the notion of an organization as being customer centric. In other words, this is an organization that focuses on customer needs. Many traditional companies concentrate on producing high quality products and are sometimes described as product-driven. They may not be adequately sensitive to customer needs. The Outside In approach forces the organization to consider the perceptions that customers will have looking from the outside.
This Outside In view also has merit in thinking about websites. Many website owners are proud of the online presence they have created. As they explore what they have created, they may well rightly feel that they have produced a website with a mass of useful information for their prospects and clients. As they look from the inside, the online structure they have developed may well appear most impressive.
Taking the Outside In perspective may produce a different answer. A visitor from the outside only sees the page they land on. With Google searches that may possibly not be the front door: the Home page. They may check out a few other web pages but are never fully aware of the hidden mountain of information that they could explore. If a site map is provided, they can certainly see a long list of what is available but few visitors probably do that.
This different view of the website might appear just a question of different amounts of knowledge, but in fact the Outside In view is a better reflection of what this website notion really involves.
That Outside In view that sees only a series of web pages is in fact reality. The alternative view that in some sense there is a website on the Internet which represents a closely related set of web pages is false. If you do not find that statement sufficiently outrageous, then for simplicity let us say that websites do not exist. A website is just a loose definition of a group of web pages connected by hyperlinks. If you try to make a precise definition of a website, you will find that it does not fit most websites in real life.
Although an owner of an online property may feel a certain group of Web pages constitutes their website, the web pages are quite independent of each other and there is no simple tag or label that indicates which website they belong to. Each web page does contain hyperlinks of course and these may well link with other web pages that are owned by the website owner. The search engines only index web pages and they too have no tag or label that indicates which website any given web page belongs to.
This is not just playing with words. Of course the front end of the URL of a given web page may well be identical with the front end of other related web pages. If so, any hyperlinks between the two web pages can be called internal links. However at no stage of this analysis is a website label attached to each of these web pages.
This is not intended to fuel a philosophical discussion. Rather these distinctions have very important consequences in how the group of web pages should be monitored and managed.
The best big picture view of the Internet is that it is a huge population of web pages which are interlinked via hyperlinks. Any association among a group of web pages is really determined by these hyperlinks. It is not determined by whether or not those web pages exist within the same domain or sub domain.
You may occasionally hear that it is important to get inlinks or backlinks to a website in order to make the website more search engine visible. This should really be interpreted to mean that the particular web pages that are the target of such inlinks will be more search engine visible. It will also give more authority to other web pages they link to. However the authority that passes through these hyperlinks will be the same whether these hyperlinks target closely related web pages or quite independent web pages.
This outside in view of what we call websites highlights the challenge. It is not sufficient just to get a large number of inlinks pointing to the Home page of that fuzzy collection you call your website. This will get a highly diluted amount of authority for all other web pages that are buried deep within the website structure. The best working view is that every web page must create its own visibility through its own inlinks.
This is the difficulty with a traditional website. You add a web page but the only inlinks it has are those created within the website architecture. Special efforts must be made to generate backlinks specifically for any given web page.
This is where a blog becomes so much more powerful. Every new web page (blog post) that is added automatically generates its own inlinks from a variety of sources. Such things as Technorati tags or Deli.cio.us references are one way. To this we can now add social media such as Twitter and Facebook, even though the initial references may have nofollow tags. As human viewers see the references, they may create blog posts themselves that reference (link to) the new web pages. In addition you have the whole slice of the Internet that is set up to handle RSS news feeds with other social media such as FriendFeed to spread the buzz even more.
So forget you have a website. It is sloppy thinking and you will not target your efforts in the best way. Realize that what you have created is a group of web pages. Some of those web pages are much more important than others. Those are the web pages that should be highly visible to the search engines. Plan carefully how you can concentrate your efforts on those ‘money’ pages. You will get much more bang for your buck.
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As might have been expected, mobile device screens keep getting smaller even though desktop monitor screens get bigger. That paradox is one that is difficult to avoid. Mobile devices are becoming ever more popular and must be highly transportable. That gives you two problems
The keyboard is an easy one to resolve since voice control can provide an ideal input method. Indeed smart phones are designed to handle voices so what could be better.
The screen is an entirely different problem. It might appear that mobile web pages must be small. However desktop screens show what the user really wants. Much more information and much more interactivity with a higher content of a whole variety of multimedia experiences.
What could be the answer? Perhaps the words of that Peter Gabriel song may give a clue, In Your Eyes.
If you consider that difficult to believe, consider the words of an informed spectator of the digital world. Robert X. Cringely suggests that the solution is Pictures in Our Heads. He too sees a huge growth for mobile devices since the purchasing cycle is rapid and new technology comes along very fast. Reluctantly he accepts the voice control approach to inputting data as we struggle with an ever diminishing keyboard.
Where he opens up a whole new way of thinking is when it comes to that mobile screen.
We’re at the point right now where primitive single-pixel displays can be built into contact lenses. They act as user interfaces for experimental devices like automatic insulin pumps. This already exists. A patch of carbon nanotubes on your arm continuously monitor blood glucose levels, driving a pump that keeps your insulin supply right where it should be. Any problem with the pump or the levels is shown by a red dot that appears in your field of view courtesy of that contact lens. The data connection between pump and eyeball is wireless. The power to run that display is wireless too, since the contact lens display scavenges RF energy out of the air to run, courtesy of that mobile phone on your belt and that WiFi access point on the ceiling.
While that display is a single pixel today, we can pretty easily predict at what point it could be the equivalent of HDTV. Except I don’t expect we’ll ever get there.
Shortly we will communicate with our devices, I predict, through our thoughts. By 2029 (and probably a lot sooner) we’ll think our input and see pictures in our heads.
In other words, we avoid the need for mechanical devices between our neural circuits and our smart devices. Both ways communication will occur directly from your brain waves to the Internet via wireless transmissions. Only twenty years to get there but perhaps that is a very feasible scenario.
High performance delivered is a slogan that Accenture has made famous. It is a powerful reminder of how businesses can achieve success. The thinking can be applied to any business function: that includes websites.
When you hear the words high performance, your mind may immediately switch to images of glossy automobiles with highly tuned engines. In some ways a website can be similar to that glossy automobile. In both cases high-performance means doing what is necessary to ensure the vehicle will perform as well as it can. With both that only has meaning when there is a clear objective to be achieved. In the case of the automobile it may be high speed. In the case of the website it probably has something to do with how visitors appreciate and interact with the website.
High-performance is a question of efficiency. Only when you have scales to measure performance can you begin to tune it for even better performance results. For a time it was customary to do website reviews. As we pointed out in the previous post, with greater knowledge, people are now requesting website audits. As with any audit, this gives concrete results that measure what has been achieved and suggest what improvement can be targeted.
A website is much more than just what people see in the first ten minutes exposure to it. Many factors are involved in delivering the best customer experience to website visitors. A big part in getting visitors to the site may be the search engine visibility the website has created. Once on the website the first impression is very important. Thereafter the visitor must find it easy to navigate around the website in order to get the information they are seeking. The content of the site must be such that visitors develop a sense of trust in the website owner. This in turn increases the probability that they will react positively to any call to action. For example some may choose to buy the product they were looking at.
If a website must now be strong in all these different dimensions, this raises the question of how best to choose a website designer. Any website designer who is aware of all these different dimensions will no doubt illustrate their team’s multitalented abilities through their own websites.
If one is seeking an all-around website designer, what might their website showcase. A prime example of this is PrimeView who offer Arizona web design.
Their website features a number of skill sets which they feel are important.. The main ones are web design affecting the immediate impression of the website, Internet marketing, e-commerce where online purchases are involved and Arizona SEO.
This is not the case of being good at everything but master of none as you can check by visiting their cool before and after gallery.
As more people become frustrated by a nonperforming website and become aware of those who are operating high-performance websites, the shift will be on. Websites can achieve very strong results if they are only built with high performance in mind right from the start.
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In the past I have expressed some skepticism about the free website reviews that are available.
Another aspect of this topic came to mind when I took part in a website audit online chat hosted by David Harry via his Huomah SEO Blog. I suddenly realized that there is a world of difference between the words review and audit.
Most often the word review is used about art objects, like a play or a book. It is usually one person’s opinion and clearly it is always subjective.
If you want a review of your website, it could be triggered by a simple question like, What do you think of my website? The word review almost emphasizes that this should deal with how the website looks to the reviewer.
If you regard your website as a work of art, then such a review may be all that you are looking for.
Many website owners need more. They build their websites to achieve certain goals. A review that indicates that the reviewer found the website attractive is not very helpful in measuring performance against goals. Some people have therefore attempted to put some precision in this process by offering grades for websites.
For example Website Grader does attempt to measure how well a given site will appear in the search engine listings. This particular blog seems to be rated quite highly by such a tool.
However the method of computing the score can be somewhat arbitrary and certainly Michael Gray has some major reservations about this process. In addition it is not clear that such a grading tool will give the right list of actionable items to help improve the website.
The word audit would seem to be a much better choice for a tool that can help point to ways of improving the website. An audit is a disciplined monitoring process to identify how well a website is performing on the important factors involved in achieving the website’s objectives.
A good audit will cover all the important parameters of the website and provide measurements of the website’s position. This allows a detailed list to be prepared of what actions are needed for full performance improvement. The hard-nosed audit process is much more likely to be useful than the somewhat soft and fuzzy review.
A full website audit can be extremely detailed and take a significant amount of time to complete. However in some cases a more summary mini-audit may quickly identify important major factors that need correction. It is for this reason that SMM offers a range of mini-audits to check out major problems when only limited budgets are available.
If you are concerned about your website and whether it is performing as well as it might, why not get in touch with us for which ever audit will work for you.
In some parts of the world, more of your customers would be trying to find you on a mobile device than via a regular computer. That mobile device might be an iPhone or a Blackberry or even a cell phone.
If you rely on local customers visiting your establishment, then the odds go up dramatically that some customers will be trying to find you while they are on the go. If you hope that your existing traditional website will be visible and give a pleasing introduction to your company then you may be in for a big disappointment.
Some mobile device browsers such as the Opera Mini browser do a remarkable job in doing the best they can to make a traditional website mobile friendly. However only a very small fraction of mobile users are using this browser. Even if they do, a website that has been designed to give a good user experience at a typical screen width of 1064 pixels presents challenges at even 300 pixels. It implies an unacceptable amount of downward scrolling.
Another factor that brings the mobile web closer is the increasing popularity of Twitter. People are used to working with very small snippets of information. One Web Is Here is how F J van Wingerde sees it.
This is not new. Even back in 2007, Johann Burkard was encouraging all to Get your website ready for the Mobile Web in 10 steps. His steps were:
There some good suggestions there but this oversimplifies the problem. What is required is a website designed specifically for mobile devices. It must be very much simpler and ideally should require minimal scrolling. SMM has such a mobile website at www.lbost.com. It offers Local Business Online Smart Tips (LBOST).
It uses a CSS stylesheet appropriate for mobile devices with one small addition that only operates on traditional computer screens. In this case a maximum width of 300 pixels applies. This means that even on a traditional screen, you see the website as you would on a mobile device.
This is achieved by the following lines in the CSS stylesheet together with putting the whole web page within a div with the id container:
@media screen { #container {
width:320px;
margin: 0 auto;
} }
It is useful to see the mobile content in a more limited width like this. It is a constant reminder of the challenges that are faced in trying to keep it simple for a mobile device.
Communicating well with that growing audience of local customers who are on the go is not just a question of having a good mobile device display. As in the traditional Web, a big determinant of the number of visitors is visibility in the search engines. Google et al. are having some difficulties in doing local search effectively. Important showcases here are the Google Local Business Center and Google Maps.
LBOST provides a window on this rapidly evolving scene. To be on the leading edge, subscribe to the RSS news feed and get the news as it happens.
If you accept that keeping up with the competition requires that you have a mobile Web presence then why not contact us now.
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Angie Haggstrom makes some interesting points in her article, Optimize Your Mobile Website And Stop Losing Money! on SEO Scoop. A recent Orange research study on mobile marketing had some results that may surprise you. After following the habits of over 2,000 mobile surfers and looking at both quality and quantity, here are a few of the findings that I found surprising:
She then goes on to give some great advice on how to monetize this explosively growing Mobile Web. According to her, it is all about immediacy. The written content should be rich in active verbs to produce powerful sentences and encourage visitors to take action. Lastly, you might also want to consider trigger words such as ‘fast’, ‘easy’, ’simple’, and ‘free’ (who doesn’t like something that’s fast, easy, simple, and free??)
That very same thinking has triggered the new SMM mobile website, Smart Tips. It is designed for mobile devices with any web page having only 100 words or less. It is designed to show on a regular PC how it will appear on a 320px width screen. It is also linking with the Local Business theme since that is where you will see the biggest impact of the Mobile Web. These are exciting times and there is much to learn.
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Two news items about the Mobile Web bring to mind that troubling truth about Screen Resolution. It is like the Gordian knot of web development.
Web designers now regard the minimum screen resolution for a desktop PC as 1024 pixels by 768 pixels. On the other hand (most appropriately), a smart phone may be as large as 480 pixels by 320 pixels. Looking at the cell phone, you are down to possibly 128 pixels by 160 pixels.
The mathematics of this mean that if you try to look at a desktop PC web page on your smart phone you must scroll down 5 times as much as you did on the PC. The cell phone is even worse forcing you to scroll down 38 times as much.
Nevertheless, the word is that The Mobile Web is the New Hangout. One indicator is that the Opera Mini Browser Sees ‘Explosive Growth’
Opera claims that the browser has seen a whopping 157% year-over-year growth, with more than 23 million people using Opera Mini in March 2009. This represents a 12.1% increase from February 2009 and more than 157% up from March 2008. The page view figures are impressive too, with users viewing more than 8.6 billion pages during March 2009, up 17.4 per cent on the previous month, with year over year page views increasing 255%.
We can assume that this did not involve all that scrolling down that would be involved if they are looking at desktop PC designed web pages.
Not surprisingly given this explosive growth, the BBC is asking, Is the mobile web coming of age? The article has some most interesting quotes.
EBay’s senior director of platforms and mobile Max Mancini states:
The first hype cycle on mobile failed because people wanted to recreate the desktop on the phone. The mobile device is not an alternative view into the web. It is a different experience. It might be an extension to different things on the web, but the real winning application on mobile will be the things that will be very unique to what you can get from a mobile device like the camera, the location, the address book and the communications.
Ernest Doku, of comparison site Omio.com, agrees:
We should not be looking at replicating the desktop on mobile. What people want on their phone is very different from what they want to experience seated in front of a PC.
Others are of a like mind. One of the most insightful comments is from Sir Tim Berners Lee, who told the BBC:
In developing countries it’s going to be exciting because the Mobile Web is the only way that a lot of people will actually get to see the Internet at all.
Google’s vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra said the migration to mobile was a natural progression for the world’s leader in internet search.
The entire world is moving to mobile and mobile is the most personal of all personal computers. This year we are going to sell more internet-connected phones as an industry than the entire notebook market. These devices will become our agents, support us with advice, be our friends.
The explosive growth is not new. Last year it was noted that Small sites drive big traffic on the mobile Web. The question was asked whether website owners were ready for the Mobile Web, which was the Next Big Thing.
The preferred solution at that time was to design websites with The One Web Principle in mind. By a process of Adaptation, the website would deliver the appropriate web page content dependent on the mobile device that was attempting to display the web page.
That is a very challenging approach. Clearly there are some things that should be avoided in mobile web design. Some major effort must be invested if Web Sites Are To Adapt to Mobile Access.
Perhaps a surer route is the approach that some adopt, which is to have a number of parallel websites, each designed for a particular range of devices. It is what has been called The Multi-Web Practice.
Installing Internet Explorer 8 provided a great reminder of how complicated it is to produce great web site designs. Just read the explanation of how Microsoft Is Expanding Support for Web Standards
Internet Explorer 8 has been designed to include three rendering modes: one that reflects Microsoft’s implementation of current Web standards, a second reflecting Microsoft’s implementation of Web standards at the time of the release of Internet Explorer 7 in 2006, and a third based on rendering methods dating back to the early Web. The newest rendering mode is forward-looking and preferred by Web designers, while the others are present to enable compatibility with the myriad sites across the Web that are currently optimized for previous versions of Internet Explorer.
That is the reality of the online world that Microsoft has created through its continued support of the legacy websites that were designed with prior versions of Internet Explorer. On top of that you have the problem that different browsers interpret the web standards in different ways in such matters as the width concept (padding in or out, etc.). No wonder web designers need all the help they can get in coping with this complex world.
Some people have tried to produce checklists that will help the web designer develop with best practices in mind. For example, Terry Morris has a Web Design Best Practices Checklist. He covers in detail such topics as Page Layout, Browser Compatibility, Navigation, Color and Graphics, Multimedia, Content Presentation, Functionality and Accessibility. It is good as far as it goes, but it does not cover the big picture.
Robin Good casts the net wider with his 20 Rules Of Smart And Successful Web-development. However again it relates much more to the visitor experience on the website, than how the website should achieve whatever goals may have been set.
Ensuring you know what you are trying to achieve and measuring your progress towards those goals is an essential part of effective website management. This covers more than just what is important in web design. It must also deal with how the website is marketed for maximum relevant traffic and how visitors to the website ‘convert’ to become clients or at least warm prospects.
This is what Andreas Huttenrauch, Internet Strategy Consultant and Web Architect, covers in his guide to Web Development Best Practices. That of course includes what might be designated as Best Practices in Web Design, which are covered in great detail. In addition based on almost two decades of experience, he covers all other necessary topics including legal requirements and obligations and security matters. Only a well-rounded guide like this can ensure all critical issues are handled successfully.
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