When you’re planning a new website design or updating your existing website, it can be very tempting to use lots of fancy graphics and animation. Used properly, graphics or animation can make a website more eye-catching and encourage users to stay on your site for longer. However, if you’re serious about search engine optimisation (SEO), it’s important to remember that people use a lot of different devices to access websites, and to ensure your website is suitable for all of them.
For example, many people now use their mobile phones to surf the web. The web browsers on mobile phones often can’t cope with some of the more complicated website features, such as animations. This means anyone trying to access such a website with a mobile phone may find it frustrating not to be able to see all the content, and give up. This means you lose a potential customer and the short amount of time they’ve spent on your website will count against you in Google’s rankings. The same issues can arise when people use other devices to surf the web, such as tablets and smaller laptops. Many websites aren’t optimised to display on mobile devices, and users will become frustrated with things like text scrolling off the side of the page or pages that take a long time to load.
So when you’re planning a website design project, it’s important to make sure your website will display in an attractive way for all the different kinds of devices that people may use to access it. You could achieve this by ensuring your website is very simple, so that it is quick to load and view on a mobile device. Alternatively, you could choose to have a separate mobile website, which contains all the same content but optimised to display attractively on smaller screens like mobile phones and tablets.
Whichever you choose, paying attention to how people will access you website will pay you dividends in the long run, encouraging people to stay on your website and buy your goods or services. It will also help improve your Google rankings, as more people will stay on your website for longer.
