Have you ever looked at a website at home and it looks great, then you check again on your smart phone and you couldn’t understand what you are looking at?  Say you are trying to show your friend a place you had seen earlier and it doesn’t quite come up on your phone.  The pictures and words seem all off?  It’s a common problem now that more and more people access the web through their mobile devices. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way to ‘adapt’ to the different screens?

Responsive design is one of the fast growing trends in design that takes a different approach to how a page is designed and tries to ‘adapt’ to the user screen.  In the past, websites were designed using pixel numbers, like in photography, to display words and pictures.  This usually made the best viewing on a PC or laptop.  Using Responsive Design, however, we can change these pixel numbers to a percentage (yes, there is a little math involved).   This makes the content more flexible as it changes from one device to another.  So no matter how big the screen is on your device, you get the same quality view.

We are bombarded out there with HDTV’s, tablets, smartphones and all the other techie toys, and we expect high quality websites with good looking graphics.  We don’t always have time to fire up our laptops, we want to pull out our phones and get the info we need  right here, right now…and Responsive Design helps us get that.

Is it perfect? No. But it is a promising step forward that we’ve included as an option to our designs. We expect this trend to continue to grow as we continue to use our mobile phones more and more over traditional PC’s and laptops.

2. I resolve to update my look.
About 5 years ago I was literally stopping traffic! Now, I hardly get a second glance.  Well I have really let myself go for a few years but not this year. For my new look I’m thinking less stale & frumpy template and more sleek & sophisticated custom design.   Hey, I’m worth it!

3. I resolve to be more social.
Hi everyone!  (see I am already starting.) I am ready to be more than a brochure website. I want to be engaging and have more interaction with my visitors and fans.

4. I resolve to be friendlier.
First, I want to be more user-friendly.  I need to include better organization, navigation and messaging in my next redesign.

Secondly, I want to be more Search Engine friendly. This year I want to really optimize myself to dramatically improve my rankings.

Lastly, I want to be friendlier to mobile devices. More and more of them are trying to access me on their little screens. I need someone to make a smaller, less-flashy mobile version of myself just for those mobile devices.

5. I resolve to study more.

I want to study up on how to be the best website I can be in 2012!  I am willing to adjust as needed based on what I learn about myself from studying the results from analytic reports.  Who is looking for me and how can I make it easier for them to find me?  Who says a website can’t be beautiful and smart at the same time.

Are you a do-it-yourself-type of person? I am. I hate spending money!

For instance I would never pay someone to do my laundry. At least that is what I used to think. Allow me to explain. After graduating college, my husband and I packed all our belongings to go teach school on a far-away tropical island. It was a beautiful island. Except inside the local Laundromat.

Ah… the Laundromat. It was crowded, smelly, rusty, and I had to go there to do laundry every week. I would take $20 worth of coins and fight (as politely as possible) for machines that were close to each other. I would spend 3 hours, starting washers, monitoring washers, transferring to dryers, switching to dryers that actually dried, discreetly folding unmentionable articles in public, then hauling it all back home.
In the end I felt tired but I was proud of my laundress labors. I came home with clean clothes for the family so we could soak them all with tropical sweat the next week. Besides, it is only 3 hours and $20/week.

This went on for one entire year. That is, it went on until I had my Eureka moment.

It was a moonlit night and I saw my friend packing her clean folded laundry into her car. She was not sweaty, ragged or worn. She was not bitter over losing precious quarters down the coin slot of a broken dryer. She told me that the owner of the Laundromat would take a week’s worth of our laundry and wash, dry, and fold our laundry for us. I had always known that they offered this service but I just figured it would cost $50 or $60. So I went in and spoke with the owner and she said she would indeed wash, dry, and fold my laundry. She said it would cost $15. Yes, $15!
Now I may be a DIY person. But I decided that some things are better left to the pros. I went from spending $1040/year down to $780/year. I went from spending 156 hours/year on my laundry chore to 1 ½ hours/year.

Living on the Island taught me a lot– cultural understanding, WWII history, how big the Pacific Ocean is—and most important: some things are better left to the pros.

I talk to people about web design and web marketing a lot for my job as account manager at a terrific web development firm. And I meet a lot of people like me– DIYers . If you are like me and hate spending money, remember that doing a year’s worth of Search Engine Optimization is about as much fun as I had at the Laundromat. You may feel proud of yourself but is it worth the tediousness?
Don’t waste a year of your life like I did. When it comes to growing your business, and marketing leave it to the pros. You will be glad you did.

So you hired a professional web design development firm. You got organic SEO and you are moving in the right direction. You are on the top ten in most of your keywords and new clients are finding you and contacting you. So four to six months go by and suddenly your rankings are slipping and your competition’s website is passing you up. Your design still looks great. The site is easy to navigate. What happened?

The problem with SEO is that, like any industry, it is constantly evolving. Marketers find ways to trick the search-engines and the search-engines find ways to punish the tricky marketers. Then the marketers find new strategies, and the search-engines change their ranking algorithms, so on and so forth. Think of it like the old cartoon “Tom and Jerry”.

So if you are a business owner or the person responsible for your company’s site you could spend a lot of time keeping up with the latest news regarding this cat and mouse game. Or hopefully your web design firm also specializes in marketing. If that is the case you can make arrangements with them to set up a SEM plan. That way you have someone who is constantly keeping a finger on the pulse of the SEO industry and who can keep abreast of effective new marketing strategies to make sure your site doesn’t get lost in the shuffle.

Whoa! It had a lot of those long equations– you know the ones that have more letters than numbers. I am not a mathematical engineer but I can give you my personal interpretation.

You know how wolf spiders carry the baby spiders on their back? Well search engines have virtual wolf spiders that I like to think of as info spiders. These virtual info spiders crawl over a site picking up on heading words, key words, dates of updating, etc. They crawl through portals (aka other links) that connect to the site. They pick up all these little facts and data and carry them on their virtual backs back to the spider web headquarters. Then they input the data and facts into a big mathematical equation or algorithm that looks kind of like this:

[bold words + (keywords ÷ last update) - ¾most recent update] x amt of clicks – (spamminess X outdated stuff)= how high on search engine results page

Actually the algorithm is much longer and more complicated but I hope you get the idea.

But there were two main problems. The first was simple ignorance. The do-it-yourself website people and many professional website designers alike didn’t understand how it exactly worked and sometimes having text in graphic boxes or too many graphics or flash lowered the sites rankings. Why? Because these things were unreadable to the little spiders. But the things that were unreadable were so popular like a cheesy theme song audio playing on the home page or bouncing yellow smiley-faces. These innocent mistakes were actually making good sites rank worse than they were. The second problem was not as innocent. In the earlier days cunning web marketers figured out ways to try to trick the spiders by stuffing extra heading words, keywords or questionable back links. This worked for a while. However Google wised up to their tricks and changed their algorithm accordingly a few times. Basically they want the top site of a particular search to really be the TOP site–not just the site with the most cunning web marketer.

Fortunately, if you hire a great web design and development firm, they will create the site by making sure from the start that the site will have all the good things the little spiders are looking for in all the right places. Not only that, but they will also keep current with search engine standards and changes to algorithms such as the ones recently released in January 2011. When the site is ready to go public it will be off to a good start!

Search Engine Optimization is just making appropriate changes to improve performance in the realm of being able to be found by the people you want to find you. It is trying to get higher to the top of the search results page. Consider keeping this in mind when you are starting your new site or enhancing an old one. Because the spiders aren’t going away—but they are getting smarter.

Next week: Continuing optimization through Search Engine Management.