Saturday 12 September 2015

Responsive Web design makes an inefficient design too darn easy

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Responsive Web design makes scaling a website up and down for a mobile device easy. Almost as easy as it facilitates sloppy designs that don't even try to intelligently choose what stays, what goes and, most critically, what should stand by until it's needed.

Fast response, almost-instant home pages and effortless scrolling are always Web design goals, but with the increasingly plummeting attention spans of mobile users, this is crucial. Nowhere is it more crucial than retail mobile sites and/or apps, where purchasing a plasma screen TV with free shipping waits for no man.

Here's where things get tricky. A proper design is intelligent, where image size/resolution/retention choices are not things that can be delegated to a script. Is that image decorative — an attractive model, a splash of vibrant color — or is it an essential depiction of the product, something that could make or break a sale?

The problem with responsive design is that it makes it far too easy to sit back and let the algorithms make the decisions. To be fair, the resultant pages generally look fine. But what they almost never are is as efficient as possible, since that requires human judgment.

I had an interesting discussion about this on Thursday (Sept. 10) with Ari Weil, the marketing vice president for a cloud vendor called Yottaa. Yes, Weil's company sells personalized designs — where the company's staff offers those human decisions — but his argument still works, severe business biases notwithstanding. He argued that responsive Web design was originally intended as a temporary Band-Aid for desktop scaling and it was forced into double duty working with phones (which were never initially designed to display data) where it "tries to force efficiencies on those devices. The result? Pages that are bloated, slow and scale poorly."

The problem in detecting these responsive site shortfalls is reminiscent of the problem of overloaded and slow e-commerce sites. All the e-commerce director sees are the large number of sales that are recorded. If they're 70% more than yesterday, everything seems great. What's missing? That e-commerce director has no clue how many customers are being turned away and, therefore, how much better than 70% the figure would have been had the site been up more.

With responsive design, there is a similar blind spot. The site/Web page looks good. But there's no way for the e-commerce team to know how many customers left because of slow response. They'll never know how many dollars would have otherwise been spent with them.

Up to now in this column, I've taken the shorthand site/app to refer to both, but there's a reason to split the two. Done properly, an app should deliver far better initial performance than a site, if for no other reason than the browser's initial download is eliminated and everything is focused on that retailer's single message.

Still, companies are focusing less on apps and more on Mobile Website Design Mumbai sites. Weil said the reason is the fear that shoppers may not want to download an app for a merchant they don't intend to use that often. Although that's true, the reason for app resistance is much deeper.

First, it's not that unusual for friends, family and romantic partners (potential as well as actual) to see the home screen/screens of someone's mobile device. That means that the apps they choose will signal how they want to be perceived. That gives a big edge to impressive sites — an atlas, Barron's, the Society for the Betterment of Babies and Small Animals — that will never be opened. The same goes for favorite sites that one may not be proud of visiting (yeah, readers, no examples are needed here).

Second, and much more fundamentally, both Apple's iOS and Google's Android mobile OSes are dreadful at displaying a lot of apps. It's not uncommon for power users to have 40 or more (sometimes far more) apps on their phones. When that happens, it can literally take more time to find the app than to launch a browser and type in the URL.

A confession, from someone who has a lot of apps on his iPhone: When no one is around, I have found myself asking Siri to find my app by saying "Siri, open GoogleMaps." Yes, I take inordinate pleasure in asking Siri to open Google apps. But having fun taunting Siri aside, it's the fastest way to open the app. And that's pretty sad.

Both iOS and Android "make it a chore to have too many apps," Weil said. "People continue to show us through their behavior that they like the actual Web and prefer it to apps." If mobile GUIs were better at handling lots of app icons, I doubt that would be true.
Those mobile OSes were designed to make things easy, not efficient. Sound familiar?

You want to create Responsive Web design Mumbai for your Business visit: http://www.creativebrandripples.com

Wednesday 9 September 2015

5 SEO Tactics You Need to Forget Right Now



As long as we’ve had search engines, we’ve had SEOs trying to game the results. For search engine optimizers who have been in the business for a long time, it can be hard to let go of the old techniques in favor of the new ones. Even marketers who know “just enough to be dangerous” are at risk of abusing tactics that Google now punishes or ignores.

We took a look at this great New SEO vs. Old SEO infographic and decided to give you our top 5 list of forgettable SEO techniques. If your site is using any of these, you need to stop (immediately!) and start cleaning up the damage you might have done.

#1. Keyword stuffing

Remember when you would visit a website only to find a list of phrases, written in an itty-bitty font, stuffed in the header or footer of every page? I remember, because I used to be the one who chose those phrases and added them to my sites. It was ugly, but it worked. Google’s less-sophisticated algorithm would assume that my page was an important one for those search terms, and like magic, the page would start ranking.

Today, keyword stuffing isn’t just frowned upon. It’s a great way to get your site penalized. As Google’s algorithm has improved, so has its ability to detect content that actually enhances the user’s experience. A list of synonymous phrases does nothing for the user, and it’s easily recognized as an outdated attempt at fooling the system.

#2. Building backlinks – any backlinks.

Back in the old days, link building was one of the main things SEOs did to get their sites ranking. A more rudimentary search algorithm would detect backlinks and used each one as an indication of a site’s usefulness. Webmasters traded links – one for one – and then began trading in triangles. “If your site A links to my site B, I’ll link back to your site A from my site C.” It was simple – and it worked!

Despite much controversy, backlinks are still worthwhile indicators of a site’s relevance and value. However, modern SEOs have to be extremely careful when they’re building links. A good backlink comes from a reputable, related site and uses natural anchor text – like a brand or company name or URL – and it appears on a site with a small number of outbound links. Over-optimizing backlinks is a dated, and risky, practice.

#3. Writing for robots.

Content is king. That’s a long-standing SEO rule, and it’s as true now as it ever was. But back in the day, the qualities that made good, SEO-friendly content were markedly different than they are today. SEO content used to be stuffed with keywords and practically unreadable for human beings. We wrote for the robots, the search spiders who crawled our pages with no appreciation for proper grammar and spelling. Yes, we actually used to include commonly misspelled words on purpose!

Since then, Google’s robots have gotten smarter. They can separate authentic writing from keyword-packed nonsense, and they reward the good stuff with higher rankings. Remember, Google is all about making search better for humans. Your content needs to speak human, too.

#4. Directory and search engine submissions.

NetworkSolutions and Web.com love to advertise their directory and search engine submission services. Once upon a time, submitting your site to the search engines and various online directories, en masse, was a good way to get recognized and grow your traffic. Today, it’s s spammy offer meant to take advantage of business owners who don’t know any better.

Don’t be fooled. Building up an accurate list of citations on sites like Yelp, YellowPages, Manta, and others is useful, especially for getting found on a local level. But submitting your site to hundreds of irrelevant, disreputable directories is a fast way to build a lot of damaging links (links that will cost you time and money to remove or disavow when they inevitably start hurting your rankings).

#5. SEO as a stand-alone service.

In the old days, search engine optimization was something that happened independent of other things. A good Search Engine Optimization Services Mumbai would use various techniques to optimize a website, making small changes to the site and going after links on other sites to get the job done.


Today, the entire landscape has changed, and search professionals have to come out of that little box in order to succeed. SEO has to be seen as part of a larger, broader domain – specifically, content marketing. Today, we write, we engage on social platforms, we build citations, and we network with influencers to reap the best rankings. Optimizing for search alone isn’t enough. Incorporating Search Engine Optimization Services Mumbai into a broader content marketing strategy is the best way to succeed today.

To know more visit: http://www.business2community.com/seo/5-seo-tactics-you-need-to-forget-right-now-01319770