What is there to consider when working with a web developer to make your website mobile-friendly?

This blog includes our experiences working with clients and can be used as a basic guide for consideration to ensure a good outcome when working with a web developer to build a mobile responsive site.

1. Review portfolio of mobile websites.

First off is to check the developers experience with responsive web design (RWD). We don't beat around the bush and display our portfolio of websites on our own site to show off our responsive web design work for real world clients. Many of these are transitions from desktop only sites to a responsive site. Please do check out other sites that we have built and feel free to talk to our clients for our references.

Responsive web design isn't just about making websites look good on multiple devices, such as tablet and smartphone. We also look at the technical factors involved in creating a mobile-friendly website. Google provide some handy tools to help review the mobile-usability of a website such as Google's PageSpeed Insights which highlights load time factors that might hinder a page's speed or usability on mobile.

2. Understanding the mobile customer.

Discuss your business with us so that we understand the common tasks that you need from the site and we can work out together the best way to optimise those tasks on the mobile site. Because our code is bespoke and in house, we have the ability to build in any functionality that your mobile customers may need.

3. Commitment to speed.

For mobile sites, a key factor in user experience and SEO is load times. We want to avoid making cusotmers wait too long for pages to load. We're familiar with techniques to help pages load faster such as eliminating render-blocking Javascript and CSS in above-the-fold content so if you want faster load times, ask us to investigate.

We're happy to discuss contractual agreements to include competitive rendering speeds or a commitment to  ensure we meet Google's guidelines and that there are no issues marked 'Should Fix' in WebMaster Tools.

4. Install web analytics.

We install web analytics such as Google Analytics and WebMaster Tools as standard. This allows us to collect aggregate information about site performance.

5. Follow Google's Webmaster guidelines.

We very much worship at the altar that is Google. There are lots of considerations involved in this but least of which is we want our client sites to be optimised for mobile and to perform well in organic search results in search engines such as Google. Part of this involves following Google's Webmaster guidelines to make sure that we meet Google's best practices for website development and mobile-usability. This helps us to understand how Google finds, processes and ranks site content which means we can tick those boxes and help client sites to be optimised and perform well in search engine results pages.

6. Agree a contract that includes improving the mobile site after the initial launch.

We understand that you'll likely collect feedback from customers and data from web analytics that we'll want to use to make the site even better.

We like to build in to our contract an element of ongoing work to help continually improve the website across multiple devices, including desktop, tablet and smartphone. This way we allow time for ongoing support and to continue evolving the site post launch.

If you're looking to create a mobile-friendly website or are looking for a responsive web developer for support/advice in making your current site responsive please call +44(0)1323 735 800 or email enq@barkweb.co.uk. You can also use our webform on our contact us page if you want to send us more details.