To find out whether Google sees your site as mobile-friendly, you can check your site with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool. How did your site fare? If it did well, you are good to go! If it could use some improvements, read on!

Responsive and Adaptive Design

A mobile-friendly website starts with a responsive or adaptive WordPress theme. Responsive design means that as the screen narrows, so do the elements within the screen. This is ideal for smaller screen sizes such as smartphones.

Adaptive design is similar except that when the screen narrows to a specific predefined breakpoint, the elements will adapt. This works well for larger screen sizes. You can even see this at work on your desktop computer. Go to Iceberg Web Design’s home page and then slowly make the browser window smaller. As you do, you will see some changes take place. The menu changes, text, and images get smaller.

If your site is not responsive or adaptive, it was likely built before the responsive code frameworks came out. In that case, it will be easier to rebuild your site with the current code.  

Create a Mobile-Friendly Site from the Beginning.

It starts with the design of your site. It helps to keep in mind that your site will have to look good on a small screen. It isn’t just a shrunken version of the way your site looks on PC. Using a grid helps a lot with this. They make your design more balanced and appealing. They offer the ideal adaptable structure that works well for both a full-sized desktop and mobile design.

Make your content Mobile Friendly

Remove distractions on the page. This is clutter on the page that slows load time and makes it harder for users to get to the information they want to find. You can help users find what they need most by showing your most important information at the top of the page. Then, offer additional information when people ask for it.

Use large, standard fonts to make copy easy to read and buttons that are large and ideally at the bottom of the screen and opposite of the thumb.

Don’t just shrink the screen. Stack it.

When adapting a page for mobile, you may come across columns that become too narrow to be of any practical use. You should stack one on top of the other to create a more visually appealing, mobile-friendly page.

Adapt your images for Mobile

As your screen-size gets smaller, you will want to reduce the size of icons, images, and other visual elements. Play around with it a bit because you don’t want these design elements to become so small that they are useless.

Pay Attention to Your Navigation Menu

A full menu isn’t going to span your smartphone’s screen the way it does your desktop screen. It would be much too small to read. At Iceberg, we use something known as a “hamburger menu.” It’s different from the one at your favorite drive-thru. The hamburger menu compresses your menu into a vertical, tappable, drop-down menu.

Keep the Mobile User in Mind.

Desktop users are sitting at home or in their office. Mobile users are usually on the go. It’s essential to keep this in mind when designing your site. On desktop computers, it’s common to see a call to action asking the user to download something free such as an article (usually in exchange for their email address). On a mobile phone, that’s not practical. Sometimes changes must be made right down to the content. In this case, when the screen is a mobile configuration, the call-to-action can change to request “Get the Free Article.” You still request their email address, and the article gets sent to them so they can download or print it later at their convenience.

The post Ways to Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly appeared first on Iceberg Web Design.

As more and more of our daily activities shift to being online, it makes sense that most shopping happens online as well. Almost every company sells their products online and it’s a mystery as to how they stay competitive, especially during the busiest shopping time of the year… Well, let’s clear things up with

Go Mobile

We are living in the age of smartphones where people use their iPhone more than they would use a laptop, desktop, or tablet. While most businesses have taken advantage of this opportunity and created mobile-friendly sites that are easy to navigate, many still have yet to board the mobile train. Creating an online store that works flawlessly on mobile browsers will allow for easy click through and provide less interference during the search process.

Include All the Holidays

People love to shop, especially when they have a good reason to. Most forget, or don’t even know, but the holiday season is made up of much more than just Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years. For instance, there is Singles Day, which reached a record high of $30.8 Billion in sales this year across Chinese e-commerce shopping platforms. There’s also Small Business Saturday, which reached a record high of $3.02 Billion in online sales. Make sure to engage beyond traditional holidays and reach into other markets!

Here is a list from Brightpearl of key dates to be aware of during the holiday season for your business.

Quick and Painless Shipping

It’s already difficult getting people to actually buy the items that are in their cart… Why make it more difficult by charging them a shipping fee once they decide to go through with the purchase? It is highly beneficial to offer free and fast shipping at checkout, especially during the holiday season because most people procrastinate buying gifts or they are tight on money. Offering free and fast shipping will make all the difference.  

Looking to Sell Online? Call Us!

We have worked with numerous businesses to create e-commerce websites that are user-friendly and help increase conversions. Feel free to check out our portfolio to explore some of our e-commerce websites and make sure to call today for a free consultation!

The post E-Commerce Holiday Shopping Trends appeared first on Iceberg Web Design.

…or are they?

Business Owners Have Been Slow To Adapt To Mobile-Friendliness

In this world where information is consumed primarily on mobile devices, one would think that the average business owner would be on top of important changing trends in SEO (Search Engine Optimization). However, just earlier this year it was estimated that nearly half of small businesses do not yet have a website – and moreover, of those that do have websites, nearly one-third do not perform well on mobile devices.

Many business owners saw significant traffic changes from the algorithm update, though many companies noticed little difference in their traffic, even after refusing to go mobile-friendly. But this is all about to change.

Google Isn’t Taking No For An Answer Any More. 

If you are in the group of business owners who decided not to update your website, or if you were sold an inexpensive “separate mobile-friendly option”, things are about to change for your Google rankings. And this time, it’s for real.

Google will now check your mobile website’s content before your desktop website’s content when ranking.

What, exactly, does this mean? In a nutshell, it means that if you are delivering two websites to your customers (separate Desktop vs. Mobile websites), the mobile version is what Google will use to determine where to place you among your competition. When a business has two separate websites (mobile and desktop), more often than not the mobile site is a simplified version designed only to lead visitors to contact the business and not to rank on search engines. These small mobile-only websites lack the content that is needed to rank on search engines – and this is going to affect the placement of the full (Desktop) version.

The days of Desktop vs. Mobile are gone – today Google recommends a responsive website, where the exact same website and set of content are delivered to desktop and mobile visitors alike. 

Buying a responsive template won’t cut it.

Yes, a cheap responsive theme may do the trick and make your website mobile-friendly. It might make Google happy for a while. But if your website is not built as a sales funnel, to convert traffic to leads, it’s not going to do you any good. Take a look at some of the low-cost templates on a smartphone before you buy, and take a look at your competition on mobile. Do the headlines flow on mobile? Can you vision your current set of content and pictures displaying on a smartphone? Do you know what it takes to convert traffic to leads on a mobile device?

A lot more than just the quick-and-dirty responsive design markup goes into creating a professional business website that will close leads. Our Minneapolis website developers have been hand-coding websites since 1993; we have more than 60 years of combined experience, and we have all been working in this field since the dawn of the smartphone technology. Our online marketing experts know what needs to be done to make your website go from just mobile-friendly to a mobile lead generating machine. Call 763-350-8762 to talk with an online marketing expert today.

The post It’s Official: Google Won’t Let You Get Away With A Non-Responsive Website Any More appeared first on Iceberg Web Design.

What was in vogue as early as last year is not always still relevant. Tying into the rapid changes in technology is the rapid change of people’s aesthetic preferences. An extreme way to make this point is to point you towards Wayback Machine, which allows people to see how their favorite websites looked in the past using a cataloged archive of screenshots. It’s amazing to see how websites like Google started out, and how they’ve evolved over the years.

But it’s not just humans who care about design…you also have to take into consideration how a search engine sees your page. And you have to design for both sets of “eyes.”

Thanks to the latest update of Google, affectionately known as “Mobilegeddon,” businesses are scrambling to make their websites more mobile-friendly. A failure to adapt might mean losing valuable organic search traffic. If you’re using Google Adwords to drive more people to your business, this could mean increased spend on pay-per-click advertising. So whether you’re trying to please a human or a search engine, it might be time to reconsider the design of your website. Click here to learn more about responsive design to make a website mobile-friendly.

Besides changing for new technology or to spruce up an old design, you may want to redesign your website for normal business changes. One thing that tends to change often is the offering of new products or services or the discontinuation of others. A lot of your old content may focus on these outdated products and services and may make no mention of the new ones. SEO is an important consideration with content, and you want to make sure that the traffic coming to your website is qualified in some way. If people are coming to your website and not finding what they need or expect, they might leave before investigating further, which is a huge lost opportunity. Besides the changing of products and services, your leadership and employees may cause a natural shift in values. If all of your content is written in a way that reflects outdated values, people may get the wrong impression of your business. It’s important that available branding be consistent, as it helps to establish trust in the company. Learn more here about how SEO works and how it affects your traffic.

So whether you’re trying to adapt to the latest technologies, update for design, or change content around to reflect newer business values, a redesign for your website might make sense. Iceberg Web Design has plenty of different options to address any changes, small or large. Contact us for more information!

The post How Often Should You Redesign Your Website? appeared first on Iceberg Web Design.

Today, the trend of having two separate websites is quickly declining – and for good reason! The early movers recognized a need to optimize for mobile, but is it possible to over-optimize? Nowadays, smart website designs are built on the basis of responsive design. What exactly is responsive design? Let’s go over the basics.

Responsive Design

Responsive design refers to the design of a website as it scales to different screen sizes. To explain a little further, imagine a website on your desktop. It has a lot of detail and the different pieces (menu, main content, footer) are spread out across the page. If you open the same website on a tablet, the design is slightly different, taking into consideration the new, smaller dimensions. The most obvious change is when you open the same website on a phone, and the elements are stacked and the design is much more minimal.

You can test for a responsive website without going from device to device. Just open your browser of choice on your desktop (or laptop) computer. Take your cursor and hover over the bottom left corner. Press your mouse button down and drag the cursor towards the left, eventually moving up. You will be able to see the website rearrange itself before your eyes. If it doesn’t scale, it’s not a responsive web design.

Another user-friendly characteristic of a responsive design is that you don’t need to redirect and approve of the mobile version of the website. Instead, the website just adjusts on it’s own, with no input necessary from the user. From the webmaster’s point of view, if you have a responsive design, you only have to update your website once. If you have a mobile version of your website, you will have to update that in addition to the desktop version. This causes an SEO problem in that the two versions of your website are competing for rank on Google.

The latest Google update has been referred to as “Mobilegeddon” because it has made mobile-friendly web design so much more important for ranking in search results. In the question regarding whether Google prefers a mobile version of a website or responsive web design, they have taken the stance that responsive design will help you to rank higher in search results.

It’s pretty clear that responsive web design has a lot of advantages, and creates a better user experience overall. If your website has a mobile-specific version, or no mobile-optimized version at all, contact us at Iceberg Web Design to see what options exist for fixing this issue!

The post Responsive Design and The Decline of the Mobile Site appeared first on Iceberg Web Design.

If you have a website that hasn’t yet been optimized for mobile, you have a big decision to make, and not doing anything is not an option. The choice becomes – do I retrofit my website for responsive design? Or should I create an entirely new website design that incorporates responsive design from the get-go? There are a couple different factors to consider when determining what’s right for you.

Responsive design retrofits

A responsive design retrofit is just what it sounds like: we take your existing website and make it mobile-friendly. This involves some changes to the website’s template files and the addition of cascading style sheets (CSS3 files) that allow your website to properly adjust to the devices a visitor is viewing it from.

First and most importantly, not all websites will be eligible for a responsive retrofit. Most modern websites will be able to handle the process of changing to a retrofit – however, if pages have outdated programming or static files with on-page styling, there might be a problem. It will either add additional time to the project or will prove a need for a redesign. In general, if your website is 3 years old or less, a responsive retrofit should be possible, but obviously there are some exceptions.

Assuming there’s nothing that would disqualify a responsive retrofit, here’s what to expect. First, the design will only change where necessary to a responsive design that is mobile-friendly. Design elements will not be disrupted if at all possible. The main difference will likely be the menu, and how it appears on a mobile device. Iceberg Web Design can turn around these projects very quickly and in a way that satisfies Google’s mobile-friendly check.

When is it time for a new website?

If it’s been more than 3 years since your website was designed, it’s time to consider a new website with responsive design. Having a responsive design from the onset makes it so your website will appear correctly on any device a person uses. Given that a majority of internet traffic occurs on mobile devices, it’s more important than ever to create websites that take this into account. You’re at an advantage if you have a new business, or are just creating an online presence for your business, because you can start with a responsive design immediately.

A modern website reflects that a business is progressive and contemporary. Regardless of if you qualify for a responsive retrofit or are considering a new website that is optimized for mobile with a responsive design, you really need a modern website to compete in the modern world. Web development costs are an expense that should be built into your marketing plan. Think of it this way… what’s the opportunity cost of lost business if people don’t like the experience they get when trying to access your website on their different devices? Don’t lose someone over something so simple.

How does your website appear on a smartphone?

Take a look at your website as it appears on a mobile device with our smartphone simulator. Do you like what you see? If not, it’s definitely time to consider a change. To see if a responsive retrofit or a new website with responsive design makes more sense for your business, contact our Minneapolis website design company. Our experts will help you to determine what makes the most sense for your website.

The post Responsive Retrofit or New Website – Which is Best for Your Business? appeared first on Iceberg Web Design.

The Impact of Google’s Recent Algorithm Change

Before diving into logic steeped in data, consider how you consume content in your day-to-day life. Do you read articles between meetings, during your commute, while absentmindedly walking around? It’s no surprise that a lot of these activities happen on a mobile device of some type. Data shows that desktop content consumption is going down and mobile content consumption is taking it’s place. As such, search has been affected and Google’s recent algorithm change is an attempt to make sense of these behaviors.

So how does this impact your website?

Let’s start with the bad news.

In a recent study undertaken by Adobe, it was found that organic traffic was down up to 10% among websites with low mobile engagement. Regardless of the volume of traffic to your website, 10% is not a number to scoff at. This problem has snowballed due to marketers driving up costs for pay-per-click advertising, which in turn has lead to higher costs overall for un-optimized websites. And while the costs are higher, the return is lower – not as many people are clicking through or completing conversions as before Google’s “Mobilegeddon.” Adobe is reporting that Google is “losing ground as a marketing vehicle,” but their report draws quick conclusions for a bigger problem. Obviously, if every website had taken charge of being mobile-friendly before Google reflected a need for it in how it populates search results, websites would not have been affected.

The good news?

Google’s recent algorithm change rewards websites that have adjusted to the masses consuming content on their mobile devices. If your website already has a responsive design, you may not have to make many or any changes to take advantage of the way search works now. If not, it’s definitely time to consider a change. And it’s not too late to make a change! But don’t wait – any website changes take time, often months, for a search engine to recognize. Don’t let too much time lapse or the problem will compound.

So what are your options?

You could ignore the changes and dig yourself into a whole with less traffic, higher pay-per-click-prices, and a lower return on paid advertising. Obviously, that’s not ideal and will cost your business a lot in the long run. Or, you could make your website mobile-friendly. You can opt to retrofit your website with responsive design, or redesign with a version that is mobile-friendly from the get-go. To see how your website appears on a smartphone, check out our smartphone simulator.

Our Minneapolis website development company can help you to determine what makes the most sense for your business and website. Contact us for more information regarding responsive design or a responsive retrofit.

The post The Impact of Google’s Recent Algorithm Change appeared first on Iceberg Web Design.

Google will now use mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This means that if your website is not mobile-friendly, it will lose ranking on mobile searches.

On February 26, 2015, Google unveiled in a blog post their plan to start penalizing websites that do not incorporate mobile-friendly design. They will do this by drastically limiting the appearance in mobile search results for all websites that are not mobile-friendly. The longer that website owners wait to upgrade their websites, the more detrimental this change could be for their business.

In Google’s Own Words

Don’t just take our word for it. This announcement comes directly from the Google Webmaster Central Blog. In Google’s own words:

“Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices.”

 In other words, if your website is not mobile-friendly, smartphone users won’t find it in a Google search. Period.

Google is finally acting

Google has been warning webmasters of this change since early 2014. They have published articles on their blog outlining the benefits of having a mobile-optimized website, they have released tools that allow you to check your user interface and how well it performs on mobile devices, and they have stated many times that responsive design is their preferred method of optimizing websites to be mobile-friendly.

With nearly 40% of all online searches coming from mobile devices, this is not a surprising update. In fact, we think Google took a bit too long to make this change. Consumers are used to being able to find what they are looking for in a few taps of their smartphone. With this change, smartphone users will no longer need to weed through pages of outdated websites, or pinch-and-zoom to find what they are looking for.

Go Mobile-Friendly

If you have not yet upgraded your website to be mobile-friendly, this should be the final push to get you to make the change. Iceberg Web Design specializes in a website design technique known as responsive design. This is a programming style that allows your website to display optimally on all screens: from the largest wide-screen monitor to tablets and the smallest smartphone.

Don’t lose business to your mobile-friendly competition. Contact Iceberg Web Design today for a free, no-obligation consultation. We would love to tell you more about our Anoka MN website design company, and talk about how we can help keep your website from dropping off the mobile search results.

Will this change the way you do business?

Let us know how this change impacts your business. Comment below, or contact our Minneapolis website development firm to let us know how you plan to update your website for this change!

The post Google now uses mobile-friendliness to rank your website appeared first on Iceberg Web Design.