One more (very good) reason to have a Responsive Website

All hail Googlebot!

A while back I wrote this post describing why your business should have a responsive website. In the article I included the standard reasons, i.e. your website is optimised to give the best impression on a wide range of devices, it's easier for visitors to use your website regardless of which device they are using,  you don't need to have a separate website for visitors using smartphones to access your site – if you want the full story I'd suggest you read the post. In any case there’s now another, very valid, reason to ensure that your website is mobile-friendly.

The boys and girls at Google have decreed that, in addition to relevance of content, frequency of updates, keywords, age of website, amount of site traffic, and inbound and outbound link quality a new factor will be added – whether or not the site is mobile-friendly. If your site is not responsive, or does not respond well to queries from different media, it will not rate as well as a responsive site does. The result is that the Page 1 position that you have worked to maintain on Google could well be gone at one fell swoop, and the only way to regain it is to upgrade your website to responsive design.

It’s a sad fact that while responsive design has been around for a few years now the majority of business websites are designed for computer systems only and do not cater for alternative methods of viewing web content such as smartphones, tablets or smart TVs (yes, at the current time this is even true of this blog!). During this time the number of media queries from the new generation of web capable has grown exponentially so it was really only a matter of time before Google decided to take this step.

In short, if you have a business website and it is not responsive on different media devices, now is a very good time to talk to your web design team about a site upgrade.

Not sure how your site is seen by Google? Check and see if your site passes the Google ‘mobile friendly’ test here. If it fails and you want more information or would like assistance we invite you to contact the team at mhdesign.

Is YOUR Website ‘Responsive’?

I don't mean ‘interactive’. Nor am I talking about the reponse that visitors have when they see your website. What I’m asking is whether or not your website ‘responds’ to the environment that it is viewed in.

Just a few years ago there were far fewer options for viewing a website. The normal viewing environment was a computer, and the biggest worry for a web designer was whether to make the page width 800 or 1024 pixels wide. The only other option for viewing a site was a cellphone. Sure, some sites had a ‘mobile only’ version but this was normally a vastly stripped-back version of the ‘main’ website. And the reason for this was twofold. Firstly mobile phones of the time had very limited bandwidth and processor capabilities. And secondly, the inadequate browsers and miniscule screens available meant there was a legitimate excuse for delivering a bare-bones version of the full site. Mobile browsing was not a pleasant experience. Website visitors that were using a mobile phone were ‘on the move’, accessing information out of necessity, not for entertainment. In short they only wanted the essential facts, not superfluous ‘eye candy’.

The arrival of the smartphone changed all that. Larger screen sizes and improved capability proved that these phones had online capabilities closer to mobile computing than mere cellphone browsing. Throw in the arrival of different sized tablets (with portrait or landscape viewing options) and SmartTVs and suddenly there are far more ways to view websites than ever before. And this raises a problem. It wasn’t that websites that looked fine on computer monitors didn't work on other devices. It was that websites either appeared in miniature on smartphone screens, requiring excessive ‘zooming’, ‘pinching’ and ‘scrolling’ on the user’s part or appeared at less-than-optimum resolution on the large screens of SmartTVs.

Responsive design solves these problems. A ‘responsive’ website will re-configure itself to best suit the device that it is being seen on. This might mean that site content is rearranged so that the less important page elements in the sidebar appear at the bottom of the screen. The site navigation is minimised on the screen until it is needed. Images will be optimised so they download efficiently and appear at best quality on a wide range of screen sizes.

As far as site management is concerned, properly-conceived responsive design has a huge advantage over preparing different versions of a website for different media. As there is only one copy of the site to maintain, there is no need to worry about keeping different versions of the site ‘in synch’.

Finally, a responsive website is not an ‘app’. Apps are special tools or ‘applications’ designed to perform a particular function. It might be to play a game, or to access secure online banking services. A responsive website is a complete version of the website, containing all the content no matter what environment it is viewed on.

To find out about Responsive Design and what it can do for your business, talk to Mike and the team at mhdesign.co.nz

My nine most memorable moments in front of a computer

In response to this post by London-based designer Rob Cubbon, my take on his article. It's interesting to note where our paths overlap... truly, we have come a long way!

1987: I discovered the MacPlus, PageMaker 1.0 and a 300dpi LaserWriter. I grappled with on-screen type peering through a tiny greyscale monitor and thought: "No way are you getting me up in one of these things ever again". My employer told me that very soon one of these computers would be sitting on everyone's desk. Ridiculous!

1989: Discovered the Mac II which actually included a hard drive! This meant I didn't need to load system each time I turned the machine on. PageMaker 3, Freehand 2 and my favourite fonts were already loaded and ready to go. I didn't need to manually download them to printer using Font/DA Mover. Fantastic!

1992: Developed my skills. Moved from a small design company into a corporate environment. The IT guy there (Jack the Mac) describes me as a ‘Power User’. Impressive!

1994: Discovered Photoshop. Realised it was very powerful and could do a lot of stuff, but not on a Mac II CI running a 030 processor. Upgraded to a Quadra (040) with 1GB hard drive and 12MB of RAM. Now we’re talking!

1996: Discovered the Internet and wondered what it was there for. Used it to send email. Discovered TAB notation for the guitar. Still can’t read TAB -- I prefer to play my 12-string by ear, as I always have.

1999: Thought I’d better come to grips with this internet thing. Lots of websites are being designed by geeks with computer degrees -- and it shows! The sites are semantically perfect but they all look the same. New business opportunity for freelance designer. Did a course in web design (passing convincingly)!

2005: Adobe brought Macromedia. They stopped supporting Freehand MX, insisting that Mac Freehand users switch to the wonderful world of Illustrator. BOO! (I resisted for years).

2009: Discovered the SilverStripe Content Management System. Now I can set up a templated 'theme' for my client's website and they can add and edit pages as they wish. The CMS is much simpler and easier to integrate than any other CMS I've encountered. And for my clients, updating content and adding pages is as easy as using a word processor. Great!

2012: Heard about the new world of 'Responsive Design'. Still 'responding' to this one but learning more every day!

Steve Jobs - Rest in Peace

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011

IE does it again!

A picture is truly worth a thousand words. And this one cracked me up! It neatly sums up everything that web designers love about Internet Explorer. I want one for the office wall...

Spam you? I don’t even know you!

I’m more than slightly disturbed by the amount of ‘bounced’ emails that are returning back to my ‘generic’ email address.
The reason that I find this more than slightly disturbing is that I never sent the originating message. I don’t use this address to send email. The ‘generic’ email address is for generic enquiries. Nothing more. I reply to genuine enquiries from my personal email address. I only ever send email form my personal email address. So you see my dilemma. If I never sent the originating message, why am I getting bounce-backs as undeliverable?

It's all down to those pesky ‘spambots’, of course. Unfortunately, while I've taken every care, it would seem that one of the little bastards has harvested the address. I don't know how or when this happened but my generic address is ‘out there’. And now that it is ‘out there’, like all things on the Internet, it’s very hard to take it back.

So what can I do about it?

I had a spam problem a few years back which got beyond a joke. In the end I thought I would knock the problem on the head once and for all. So I took all contact email addresses from our website. I disabled the contact form (replacing it with a very clear explanation as to why I had taken this action and underlining this with my personal view of all spammers and all things spam). And, as I had already predicted would happen, all this did was turn the website from a point of dialogue to a monologue. Our message was still out there but I had effectively removed the most important part of the interactive experience of our website. It did mean that the spambots weren’t able to put their crap out through our contact form but this benefit was completely outweighed by the fact that potential clients were no longer able to contact me through the website.

When you are visiting a website you're already in ‘online’ mode. Chances are, given the choice of a form or email link you’ll click either over a telephone number (unless, of course, you were looking for a telephone number in the first place).

About the only thing I can think of this time round is to change this particular email address. This would mean, of course, that any business stationery that carries this generic address would need to be updated. I may yet do this. But, unfortunately, it won’t ever stop the spam. Although it will stop me getting the bounce-back...

Anyway, what I'm really trying to say is if you got spam emails from mhdesign.co.nz it wasn't me. And it wasn’t anybody else. Really!

FIREFOX eats INTERNET EXPLOITER!

I HATE IE! Yep, I’ve said it before, and along with hundreds of others I’ll no doubt say it again... Why do we develop Standards-Compliant websites that work in all ‘standard’ browsers, and then develop separate stylesheets or an arcane series of ‘hacks’ and workarounds to try to make our pages render sensibly in the Microsoft’s non-standard Internet Explorer browser?

Because far too many people believe Microsoft when they say that they control 135.48% of the web browser market, and can therefore call the shots regarding what passes for ‘standard’ on the internet. Their arrogance is breathtaking.

To be fair, Microsoft isn’t all bad. They did bale Apple out in the 1990s and the latest version of IE is a definite improvement on earlier efforts. But there are still far too many old versions of IE in daily use out there, from the why-don’t-my IE-hacks-work-like-they-used-to IE7 to the absolutely non-standard stuff-you-we’re-Microsoft IE6 and the plain awful IE5.

The main reason IE has such a stranglehold is that it comes bundled as part of Microsoft’s ubiquitous Windows OS, and Windows users simply don’t think of upgrading to something better. There’s a lot to be said for an “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” mentality. However this is overlooking the fact that IE is (always was) seriously “broke”.

which is why this graphic I came across today really took my fancy.

For crying out loud people, do yourself a favour and download Firefox! It’s miles better than any version of IE, it actually works and displays websites they way they’re meant to look – and even better, it’s absolutely, 100% FREE!

The dangers of Content Managed (CMS) Websites

Today I read an online article about the dangers of relying on a Content Management System (CMS) driven website to present your business to the web world and potential clients therein. It gave me something to think about. My initial view was that the article would be all about online security, hacking attacks and the like but, in fact, it was really about design and content integrity.

The thing is, setting up a content-managed website nowadays is not the huge financial expense that it once was. There are some great off-the-shelf CMS packages out there now such as Jooma!, WordPress and even New Zealand’s SilverStripe. There are a wide range of template designs available, many for free and others at a nominal cost. There are free blog services (yes, even blogspot.com) which are easy to use and can even be configured to connect through individual domain names. So why do we need to hire web designers? What’s to prevent your average small or mid-sized business downloading one of these packages and uploading the contents to a hosting server or opening a blogspot account, setting all the necessary passwords and permissions and publishing their own web content?

While the obstacles of designing and coding a website can be effectively bypassed, there are still definite security concerns when using an off-the-shelf CMS. The very fact that these packages can be downloaded and easily configured means that hackers can also download copies and look for ‘xploits’ – weaknesses in the code that can be exploited to enable the hacker to take control of installed copies of the software. The companies that write the CMS packages are constantly on the watch for this kind of activity and, as is common practice for software companies, release patches and updates to address new security concerns. However if a site is running on an older version CMS it is are potentially at risk. Do the site owners have the technical smarts to upgrade the CMS to the latest version without losing site content? And if they are running third-party extensions to add functionality to their site, are these compromising the integral security of the site? Are these extensions the latest and most secure versions?

Security concerns aside there are also design concerns. Is there a template available that fits in with the company image and branding? Can the company logo be displayed on the site pages, and can it be displayed ‘correctly’ (note: there is much more to this than simply having the logo appear on a page)? Are the colours a match to brand identity? What about typography? How many other individuals in cyberspace are using the same template? How much time is it going to take to do this work (in business nothing is ever ‘free’), and who is available to do it? Could their time be better utilised? And above all, how many design compromises should be made in the interest of having a ‘free’ website design?

It is here, of course, that the web or graphic designer comes into play. An industry professional can design a website that addresses these concerns for a one-off fee, and connect it to an easy-to-use CMS. They will include the company’s brand identity and logo, taking into account design considerations such as clearspace, typography, use of web-safe colour matches to brand colours, and introducing the special touches that embellish and enhance a brand and make the website a unique and logical extension of the brand. They can be contracted to provide site hosting, take care of security and keep the CMS version up to date. And the business owner can take it from there.

There are other considerations, however. The integrity of site content is every bit as important as the integrity of the CMS or the site design. Writing for the web is an art in itself, it is different to other written forms of communication. Web content should be split in to small, easy to read ‘chunks’. It is often less formal than heavyweight corporate documentation. It should be written in the same ‘voice’ - consistent use of language and written style. And, perhaps most importantly, it should contain keywords and phrases that help in search engine queries.

Site owners editing or changing these keywords and phrases can adversely affect search engine results. Careless editing by inexperienced persons can result in uneven or irregular formatting and paragraph spacing. Images might be uploaded that are ‘cheesy’ stock images used elsewhere that are inappropriate to the visual integrity of the site or that are simply too large (in terms of file size and download times) to display well. New site content should always be checked against the rest of the site to ensure that the writing style and language match it is in keeping with published content. Is the meaning of the content still clear or has it been compromised by excessive jargon or stock industry phrases? Is the subject matter clearly, simply and completely explained? And finally, there’s also grammar to be checked and the essential spelling checks to be made.

Any shortcuts in these areas can result in the design and content integrity of the website being compromised, with the initial investment in the site being drastically reduced. The site simply doesn’t perform as well as it should. It loses value as time passes. And eventually it becomes worthless. Worse still, in time it can actually work against it’s owner. Badly-designed and badly-maintained sites diminish the owner’s credibility with potential clients.

That’s not to say that I am opposed to Content-Managed sites at all. In fact CMS systems are a great tool that enables the site owner to keep their site fresh and current – always important when publishing information online. But appropriate care needs to be taken when site owners assume responsibility for site content.

Finally, it always pays to keep the site designer on-side to perform special tasks that might be slightly outside the ordinary. And get them to periodically audit site content as a ‘fresh pair of eyes’ to ensure that everything is still on track!

Talk to the Pod – New iPod feature!

I see that the new range of iPods are packed with new features. OK, I already knew that the iPod was much more than a simple MP3 player – the iPod Touch had WI-FI capability and I knew that you could download movies and play them on many iPods. I can see how far the iPod has come from the first 5MB ‘classic’ iPod. Since then, of course, we've had the iPod Mini, the iPod Nano, bigger and bigger capacity ‘Classic’ iPods and, of course, the iPod Touch, as already mentioned.

Some people have had their gripes about the iPod, a major one, surprisingly, being the lack of a radio tuner. Well, seeing as Steve Jobs was involved in the project from the start, perhaps this isn’t so surprising. After all, this is the man who turned Apple around in 1998 with the iMac – an all-in-one desktop computer that, thanks to Jobs’ purity of vision, lacked a floppy disk drive because floppy disks were inefficient, held a mere 1MB of data (and if you wanted to transfer a file smaller than 1MB there were better ways to do it), were unreliable and prone to errors (you can’t seriously be thinking of backing up on this, can you?) and, compared to CD media, they were expensive. So following that rationale, if you were the proud owner of a shiny new iPod with a playlist of all your all-time favourite music at your disposal, why would you want to be listening to the radio anyway? Answer, you wouldn’t. Right?

Well, this generation of iPods includes a radio tuner. And that’s not all. Amongst a host of new features I see the new generation iPod Nano even includes a video camera – although why you would want to make a video on an 8 or 16GB MP3 player escapes me. The only thing I think Apple could add to the mix now is a mobile phone – oh hold on a minute, that would be the iPhone (which also, coincidentally, browses the web, includes games and even plays MP3 files...)

So Apple, where to from here?

Actually there is one other feature that would be very useful. If you do an internet search on ‘iPod’ and ‘hearing loss’ you will find thousands of pages confirming what has long been suspected including this one from as early as 2005 – iPods, along with other portable music players that include earbuds that fit inside the ear canal are a very real contributor to hearing loss. In fact it is recommended that users listen to these devices for no longer than 60 minutes a day, at less than 60% of full volume. Greater exposure can cause permanent hearing loss in the middle ranges.

But try pointing this out to your kids and they just don’t want to know. In fact, when they have their iPods in it’s very hard to talk to them at all...

Which is why I suggest that future iPods should also include a very essential feature to compensate for the hearing loss of the iPod generation – an inbuilt hearing aid!