The Catling Mindswipe

You take a lightweight WordPress theme, hand-craft the basic homepage layout, fill the content blocks with a couple of responsive plug-ins, save it, test it on your phone and tablet and... the layout breaks. In today's world of mobile first , the layout answer is... how to build responsive layouts with media queries.

Page ranking is influenced by the number and quality of the back links to and from other pages other websites. The search engines are looking at the relevance of internal links to posts and pages on the site itself, as well as relevant links to authoritative external sites on the Internet. Not forgetting important links from other websites back to yours.

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificates are small files installed on a web server which enable web browsers to communicate securely with web sites. Having secure SSL encryption has been a ranking factor for the search engines for several years already.

We put a string of our own and client sites through the WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool (WAVE) tool. It got ugly. As we saw from the results , the combination of platform, theme, plugins and hosting plan makes a huge difference to the accessibility of each site and also determines what you can and can't fix.

Putting our own site through the WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool (WAVE) proved a little distressing; the original Blogger template threw up a horrific list of accessibility faults. One change of template later and the re-test results are... mixed.

The  Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool (WAVE) tool is a fantastic resource for testing your websites, as we discovered last time . We put a string of our own and client sites through the WAVE tool to see what it would find. It got ugly.

Your website can have good aesthetics. It can have good accessibility. Achieving both can be really hard work... The  Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool (WAVE) tool  is a fantastic resource. It's a successor to the original Bobby software that was closed down in 2008.

Why do casual visitors leave your website before the page has even finished loading? Because it takes too long to load. The search engines capture page load times and favour the fast sites because that's what people want. Get a decent web server host. That's pretty much the advice for this step. You want more? OK...

Looking at text formatting and styles, it is striking how much remains to be done . W3c's Web Accessibility Guidelines provides rich material on accessibility, but the most recent edition still misses some tricks, given the updates from the British Dyslexia Association and issues we had to resolve with a client website post-launch (as built by a 3rd party!).

If you haven't yet checked if your site is mobile friendly , do it soon. With 52% or more* of worldwide web traffic originating on mobile devices, it's no wonder that Google declared mobile-first all the way back in 2016. Responsive Design plays a huge part in site's search ranking.