Responsive vs. Mobi
Now I am sure this little tip is going to get everyone’s hair in a tizzy, but I would not be mentioning this if I have not been watching it work for my clients now for well over one year.
For the last couple of years there has been much talk about how Google will score against your website’s content if it is not a website that works well for mobile devices too, thus so many of the webbies panicking and going with a responsive design, even though many responsive designs simply SUCK! You can really tell when someone is making a website for all platforms and it is coming from a lousy template. Many of them either suck when viewing them on a desktop or vice versa, when looking at the moblie device’s version.
IMHO it is better to make a website that looks great on the desktops and yet another wesbite for the mobile devices. And there is a great way of doing this that IMPROVES your SEO factoring! It is called .MOBI.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.mobi This domain has been around for over a decade now and it is very useful.
So you build your mobile website to YOUR specifications, of how you want it to look and work and not how it works responsively! You’ll be surprised at how much nicer a website you will then be able to build for your clients. What I do is try to basically match each and every page of the desktop website, using the same verbiage and images, just maybe in a different arrangement that works better for the smaller plarform.
Then for each of the desktop’s webpages, the first thing I put into that webpage is the directional information in at the very top of the < head > for each page. So for an example, when someone with a mobile device shows up at http://coloradopressurewashing.com/ they are immediately redirected to http://powerwashing.mobi and each of the desktop website’s pages have their own directional script to send the mobile device to that corresponding mobile webpage.
Is this a lot of extra web work you might ask? Yes, you better believe it is! Making the mobile websites is a longer time consuming project than making a normal website. So why do this you ask?
Because a .mobi website is scored just the same as a normal website when it comes to the search engines and Google does not penalize a website that is a desktop website when it sees the mobi directional in use. So when doing a search engine analysis for one of these websites, one will find BOTH the normal website and the .mobi websites listed in the same search results! So therefore the goal is to have both websites listed on the first page of the search results and that happens for my clients, so yes, the time and effort is worth it for you and the client.