This and That

Posted On: 2011-06-20

Well that was a wonderful weekend but now it's time to get back to some hard work. I've got a client coming in later for some training in how to use his new blog ... there's some planning to do for another client who has a huge website that she wants people to be able to see on their mobile devices ... and I've got several personal projects that I want to spend at least some time working on today so I need to jump into today's column.

Mobile website or an app?
Let's start by thinking about mobile website design. If you haven't tried it yet then you really should spend a little time designing a site that will look good on a mobile device because more and more people are surfing the Net using their mobile phones.

I won't go into a lot of the detail about designing for mobile phones here because I've just finished a series on mobile site design over on Porn Resource and if you want to find out more then that's the place to do it. But I will say that big sites don't translate to mobile all that well unless you're prepared to cut out a lot of things that you may think are important.

That also raises the issue of whether or not to take a website and turn it into an iPhone or Android app. One of our own projects would work well on a PC or even a laptop but it's designed for people on the move so it's more important that it will work well on mobile devices.

Unfortunately it contains way too much information for a mobile device to handle well ... users would simply give up trying to find all the information they need and then wait for it to download ... but it could be a lot more useful as an app.

Of course you're unlikely to ever get an adult app passed for the iPhone but if you're working in mainstream as well as adult then maybe an app instead of a mainstream mobile site might work for whatever you're doing.

Page speed
If you've missed the previous columns where I've talked about Google's desire to speed up the web ... or last Wednesday's column over on Porn Resource ... then let me tell you that Google is getting more and more serious about the time it takes for a web page to appear on a person's monitor.

Right now page speed may not be a major factor in Google's algorithm but it is in there and I have the feeling that its importance is something that Google will ramp up in the coming months.

Google wants your web page to appear on a surfer's monitor in the blink of an eye and they're spending a lot of time talking about the need to cut down on the time it takes the pages on your site to appear.

They've even put up a page on Google Code that deals with minimizing the time it takes for a page to load and it's well worth reading.

You can find the page at code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/rtt.html but don't rush in to making all the changes that are listed on that page. It seems that some of the suggestions that Google makes on that page can lead to some serious duplicate content issues so tread a little warily

Schema.org

Have you visited that website yet? If you haven't then you really really should because it's a combined effort from the major search engines to give us a whole bunch of new HTML tags that we can use to mark up our pages in ways that surfers won't see but search engines will.

Use these tags in their appropriate places and you will be able to tell the search engines all the information that they need to see what's important on your website.

There's a heck of a lot of tags that you can use and search engines will now recognize and rank your sites according to the information that is contained within those tags.

Some of the tags really aren't relevant for us here in adult but there are other tags buried deep in schema.org that you may find highly relevant. Some of them might even bring a wry smile to your face because some meta tags that lots of people thought were dead and buried have been brought back to life in the form of a schema.

I'll let you find them for yourself, right now I'm a little busy marking up some keywords so the search engines will know that they're important. Will those new tags give websites a boost in the rankings? I guess you won't know until you do a little testing.