Today’s Mantra for the Web and Your Business Needs to be Mobile First
Moving forward, your business presence on the Web requires a mobile Web site, optimized for location and social media and powered by a modern Content Management System (CMS). Your customers and clients will want to find and interact with your Web site and with you while on-the-go, this includes sharing their findings with others via. social media. With a modern responsive Web design your one Web site can meet both desktop and mobile needs.
A recent survey by technology research firm “Net Market Share” reports that more than 90 screen resolutions are in use when you count up all the desktop, table, smartphone, and related mobile devices in the world. Depending on your project’s requirements, Responsive Web Design (RWD) would allow you to build one Web site that would look good on all devices.
Read about the RWD concept in this seminal article by the man who coined the term, Ethan Marcotte at the Web site A List Apart.
Responsive Web Design
Responsive Web design is illustrated in the graphic below. The key to making responsive Web design work is: fluid layouts, flexible images, and media queries. In landscape orientation on an Apple iOS iPad, our Web site looks as it would on any laptop or desktop with the typical horizontal menu system (see red arrow). Switch to portrait orientation on the same Apple iOS iPad and the menu system collapses to better fit the smaller form of the device.
The reconfiguration that took place provides a much improved user interface and a much more pleasant experience for the end-user of the Web site. When the mobile device is a smartphone, a responsive design is even more compelling, integrating seamlessly with the device maker’s unique user interface component.
In this example we see the Apple iOS iPhone’s “Picker” rotary user-interface component to present the menu system to the end-user. What does this do? It presents your business in a more positive light, it shows you care about your Web site’s visitors, and shows that you’re a progressive, tech savvy business.
Content Management System (CMS)
Being mobile and responsive also means that you’ll need to be more active | proactive in the day-to-day operations of your Web site. In order for you to quickly respond to rapidly changing business situations, you need to be in control of your Web site content.
Adhere to these 4 design fundamentals: 1. Simplicity 2. Usability 3. Quick Load 4. Focused Content.
With a CMS you can easily login and manage your content and communicate with your clients and customers through contact forms.
The key to all of this is your CMS infrastructure features Click >>See our list of the features that come with our CMS solutions.
In summary
The desktop version of your Web site needs to reformat for mobile devices;
You need a modern CMS to manage the backend; this will liberate you from unnecessary technical support;
Your social media activities need to drive traffic to your Web site as social media signals play a more important role for search results;
Where to start? Use a responsive theme for a Drupal CMS; and
Adhere to these 4 design fundamentals: 1. Simplicity 2. Usability 3. Quick Load 4. Focused Content.
We can build your CMS for mobile, and optimized for social media.
Call for a free estimate when you’re ready.
Ross Capaccio
+1 (847) 635-4752
Your Web site will rank high in search results if two conditions are met: 1) the content in the body of your Web page is relevant to the search query, and 2)
you have quality links pointing to your Web site.
Before social media, third party links from relevant sites “a vote for your content” were the basis of Google’s PageRank system. Today, social media plays a much larger role; a link to your Web site’s blog, for example, from a Tweet, influences search results in the same way as the third party link of yesteryear. In addition, the author’s influence makes the link that much more powerful.
Ross Capaccio