We were excited to be on Shalom Klein’s radio show, Get Down to Business, yesterday. We talked about good website design, what makes a website great and why our clients like to work with us. Many thanks to Shalom for the shoutouts. And yes, we’d love to come on your show again!
Listen to our interview.
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We love the WordPress community! This was the weekend of WordCamp Chicago. As usual, it was a time to learn, to share, and to meet old and new friends. We’ll be posting some of the interesting sessions here as soon as they’re posted on WordPress.tv.
Steve was a speaker this year, on the topic of “Fun with Chrome Developer Tools.” (Yes, developers think this is fun!) Thanks to the many people who came to the presentation and offered comments and compliments!
How do I change the font size? Why is the background blue? These are questions easily answered through the Chrome Developer Tools. Anyone wanting to do any customization of a web site needs to be familiar with them.
View this full size in your browser from Google Docs or download Fun with Chrome Developer Tools as a PDF.
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Building a website is an exercise in both forests and trees.
The right words have to be there to draw the right eyeballs, your message has to be clear, and there have to be clear and effective calls to action. These are the forest level functions.
But it’s the little things that can destroy your credibility — misspellings, poor grammar, the wrong font in the wrong place, a poorly cropped image, etc. It’s as if a tree has fallen across the path.
A website is an exercise in first impressions. What impression are you making?
Is it fair to judge a company by a typo, or when they use “your” when it should be “you’re?”
What judgments, fair and unfair, are made about your business based on your website?
Neil Steinberg brings up this point in his May 7 blog post. He wrote
I was walking down Shermer in the old leafy suburban paradise and saw that sign announcing the new place, “Agave Anejo Mexican Grill,” and immediately had this thought: They’ll never make it.”
Why? Their sign was crooked. The restaurant owners were not paying attention to the details. One little thing mars a greater whole. It’s the tree across the path. Once seen, you can’t unsee it. Your expectations have been set.
When you build a website, pay attention to the big picture but sweat all the details. Your mother was right when she said ” you only get one chance to make a first impression.”
Image credit: http://www.morguefile.com/creative/davidpwhelan
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In April, Google made an incredibly well-hyped announcement that sites that aren’t mobile friendly would not be ranked as highly as those that work well on smaller screens. That announcement generated a media storm of coverage, from innumerable tweets to articles in major newspapers. It’s brought us some business, too. Thanks, Google!
Google is not the reason you should make sure your site is mobile friendly. Your site should be mobile friendly because your visitors — a really big chunk of them — are using mobile devices and you want your site to look as good as or better than the “desktop” version. The bottom line of our argument is that most of your viewers are probably on mobile devices. Are you making them happy? Continue reading “Be Mobile Friendly for the Right Reasons”
Leave a commentWe’ve always preached that good content is good SEO*, and good SEO gets good SERP**. That’s true, but there’s now a new wrinkle. Google cares whether your website is “mobile ready“. All things being equal, a mobile ready site will be placed above one that’s not on the search results page.
What does mobile ready mean? We’ll talk about that a bit more below. First, get a yes or no answer from Google:
Is your site Mobile Friendly according to Google
Mobile Friendly means that your site reformats itself for mobile devices. Continue reading “Mobility: The next Google-quake”
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You put blood, sweat, and tears into getting a website. There were multiple revisions of the design. Text was written, copied, pasted, and then done all over again. Photos taken, photos discarded. Keywords chosen and tested. The message honed and honed again.
And then you were finished, and the Internet was better and brighter for having your site.
So you’re done!
Well, not quite. Just like getting a kitten, you take on the responsibility for a friend and a life.
What are your responsibilities to your website? Continue reading “Now that you have a website…”
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