As mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets increases for accessing the Internet, so does the importance of your website being mobile device-friendly. In fact, if you’re concerned at all about your site’s SEO, and you should be, it’s absolutely imperative that your site is mobile device-friendly and Responsive Web Design is the way to go.

More people conduct business (e-Commerce sales) on a mobile device than a desktop. Mobile-internet use is predicted to overtake desktop-internet use by 2014.  67 percent of users claim they are more likely to purchase from a mobile-friendly website. The debate over a separate mobile site vs. Responsive web design still goes on. Today, I’m going to give you a few reasons why Responsive web design is the better mobile strategy.

For starters, the SEO argument is perhaps the most salient point of all, but certainly not the only one. Google likes Responsive web design. Google even recommends Responsive web design as the industry best practice.  Because Google represents 67 percent of the search market share, I usually stop right there.  But today I won’t, I’ll explain further.

Responsive Web Design Means One URL

Because Responsive web design has one URL and the same HTML code, it’s easier and more efficient for Google to crawl, index, and organize content. A separate mobile site with two sets of code, a different URL, makes Google’s job much more difficult and that doesn’t bode well for your position in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). One Responsive website makes it much easier to share, engage, and link to your content and social media channels – much easier than a separate mobile site.

User Experience and Conversion Rates

Lets say a user is searching your Responsive website for a product on their smartphone during a break at work. He or she can continue the search later at home on their desktop device. They can then find the product and complete the purchase with ease.  That same search and purchase would be way different on two separate websites. They would have to locate the product all over again and make the purchase. Conversion rates would plummet, hurting your bottom line.

Here’s another problem with a separate mobile site; a user shares something from your mobile site with his friend on Facebook who then decides to access it from his desktop, only to find limited content on a pared-down mobile site. How exactly does that help your SEO efforts? It doesn’t! This is considered an unfriendly experience and Google now ranks user-experiences and factors it into your SERPs. Responsive web design provides a positive user-experience across many devices and screen sizes.

Site Management with Responsive Web Design

Having both a mobile website and a desktop website means two sites to manage when it comes to coding, SEO campaigns, and combining the cycle of content, search and social marketing.

Remember, by using media queries, you can make your site appear any way you like on many devices. This allows you to add or omit any elements you like to deliver the best options for each device. To recap, SEO, user experience, maintenance, and the ability to serve content tailored to your users on their choice of devices, makes Responsive web design the best option for your next startup or redesign mobile strategy.

You all know I’m big on content marketing and for good reason. It has become an integral part of designing and developing websites. Content is woven into search, and social to the point that they are no longer separate disciplines. In fact, one doesn’t work without the other.

Writer and founder of copyblogger.com Brian Clark has coined 2013 as “The year of the online writer.” He encourages writers to claim their Google Authorship in what he calls the biggest shakeup in search since the link. It’s all done with a little code in the website and the writer’s Google + account.

Google has redefined the rules of search and for the better in my opinion. Penguin and Panda has banished the thinly veiled content sites and replaced them with sites rich in quality content that are useful as well as relevant to the user’s search terms. If they’re not, they don’t get the ranking in the SERPs. SEO is no longer keywords and descriptions contained in meta tags. It is a complete strategy that works in concert with content and social. Google + is a big part of SEO, in fact Google + essentially is Google, It’s also a big part of content marketing, and of course it’s social.

Take a moment to get acquainted with these points and assertions by exploring the links above. If you’re a business owner, your business may depend on it. If you’re a writer, marketer or web designer/developer, your career may depend on it.

Google+

Whether we’re marketing our product or creating content, and by-the-way- that’s the same thing, we must think from the inside out to differentiate ourselves from our competition. We must convey what it is we believe and not what we do.

What do I mean? I believe that helping individuals and businesses succeed is the pathway to my success and the single most important thing I can do to enhance my community and surroundings. Watch this extremely inspiring talk from Simon Sinek on “How great leaders inspire action” I believe you’ll see what i mean.

Nick France Design designs and develops eCommerce website for Pure Arctic, LLC. A Norwegian Fish Oil company expanding into the US market.

This is a pure product with tremendous health benefits and a blessing to children with Rett Syndrome. We are very proud to be involved in this project. Look for more from us about this company in the weeks to come.

Creating compelling content written in a concise way, with accurate keywords, is good for SEO. Getting users to like, comment, and most importantly, share your content is key to creating influencers and brand advocates. This infographic is a blueprint for getting more likes, comments, and shares.

In the past year, mobile first responsive web design has taken off. However, it’s not exactly a household phrase – not yet, anyway. For a forward thinking web shop, trying to sell a client, sitting on a 27-inch iMac, mobile first web design can be a challenge.  So why would one? If you are a forward thinking web shop projecting the user experience into the future and imagining your client’s visitors on a device other than a desktop PC, you should be. Think about the person in a moving car on their iPhone or Android, or perhaps a person on an iPad in a café looking for a product. Perhaps they’re on a device not yet invented. These are all distinct possibilities, and arguably more likely than someone on a fancy desktop PC. So why start there in the first place?

The answer is to design for mobile first and expand the design outward from there. The result is a website designed and optimized for every device a potential visitor may have, making the experience a friendly one, regardless of where and when they visit.

We’re excited about all the possibilities new devices bring to web design. Nick France Design will embrace mobile first responsive design and we’re guessing we’re not the only ones.

For more details on mobile first RWD, read Jason Grigsby’s article on the Cloud Four Blog.

I first understood the need to get twitter updated quickly when I noticed that others were beating me to the punch on stories that I was posting at work. Allowing others to tell your story negates your influence in the community. When it comes to your story, you want people coming to you, so you can influence and control the conversation. People and companies were taking an RSS feed from Bizwire and posting to twitter with “twitterfeed” faster than I could, manually.

With a twitterfeed account, you can add RSS feeds that update twitter and other destinations, automatically. So I set up an account and gave it a go. I noticed that the initial story I posted took a while to get to twitter, and never made it to facebook. Additionally, couldn’t find a way to get twitterfeed to differentiate my fan page from my profile on facebook. I don’t want design related material getting posted on my facebook profile, I want it to go to my fan page. In my attempt to check the documentation and look around for answers I found “dlvr.it” and procured an invite. Once my invite was accepted via email, I configured my account –  and this post will be the test round. Once I click publish on this post, it should update both twitter and facebook, immediately.

If you have a website with an RSS feed or a blog with a feed and you’d like to have your news, press releaces, blog posts, or any content connected to an RSS feed pushed to twitter and/or facebook, dlvr.it may be for you. I’m hoping it’ll work for me. If you’re one of my clients, followers, or fans that either follows me on twitter, is a fan on facebook, or subscribes to my blog via email, once I publish this, you’ll get this post and you’ll know how to update twitter and facebook automatically from your feed.

CoTweet

CoTweet provides very handy and easy to use tweet scheduler. You will be able to schedule tweets for any date and time without any limits.

After much testing, following the September launch of m.tampaelectric.com, Tampa Electric’s new mobile Web site, I felt it was high-time I posted the accomplishment here. The design, production and launch of this mobile site has been a year-long goal for me and I finally carved out the time in the schedule to meet this goal. Tampa Electric, a fairly conservative company, is usually a wait-and-see type culture as opposed to a “lets be the first and lead” when it comes to communication. However, this seemed to be an easy sell — from my boss, all the way through the executive board, everyone agreed that this was a great idea. Lucky for me as this was tied to my performance review goals and rating.

NickFranceDesign.com has a mobile web site as well. A different URL is not needed to access it as it utilizes a WordPress plugin called WordPress Mobile Edition. If you browse to this site on your mobile, you will be served the mobile edition by default. If you want to browse the full site, just scroll to the bottom of any page and click “Exit Mobile Edition.”