Tips on Choosing a Mobile Web Design Platform

Consumers book flights on their desktop during work, purchase movie tickets on their smart phone while riding an elevator and pay bills on their tablets during their favorite television show. It is impossible to guess how someone will consume your content throughout the day and it is imperative to stay relevant across user devices. What kind of experience are you currently creating for your viewers on their mobile phones? If someone visits your site on a smart phone and easily navigates from page-to-page, they will spend longer amounts of time on your site and be more likely to come back again. When it comes to building brand relationships with smart phone users, mobile design is a necessary investment, well worth the time and cost.

Below are four choices to help you reach and interest mobile viewers:

1. Responsive Design: As the most efficient option when designing a site and also one of the most seamless, this choice enables you to create one site and design it to work on multiple platforms. With a new smart phone popping up almost every day, responsive design eliminates the need for constant updates and resources by displaying content relative to the size and dimensions of the screen. The benefits of responsive web design are clear, but there are a few limitations for organizations aiming to offer a unique user experience. You can read more on responsive web design here.

2. Native Applications: A native application is an app that is specifically designed to run on a device’s operating system and usually needs to be adapted based on each device. This type of app works best when your goal is to create a completely unique mobile experience. For example, a grocery store might want to help customers create custom shopping lists based on characteristics like what the store has in stock or what items are on sale each week. Customers would benefit from taking the extra time to download the native application and would hopefully come to rely on the application every week, building loyalty to the brand. Native applications are significantly more expensive to create and require maintaining code in several languages. However, if you have the resources, native applications offer a more enjoyable mobile user experience.

3. Web/Browser Applications: A web application downloads software from the web each time it runs. With browser-based Web applications, the data for the application is stored locally or on the Web. Web applications can also run without the browser, using a client program which interacts with a server on the Web using traditional Web procedures. The benefits of Web applications involve direct control over the application’s distribution and potential cost savings.

4. Combination Applications: Using a hybrid design offers a compromise and utilizes components of both native and Web applications. Most smart phone applications operate with this method and integrate with the phone’s file system along with Web services. In the long term, this format can lead to a clunky browsing process and may not be worth the saved money.

Before making a final decision, consider the current site infrastructure, evaluate business goals and determine how you want the final product to function. Each project will be different and with each site, you’ll learn which solutions work best for your needs.

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What is the functionality behind responsive design?

The functionality behind responsive design creates web pages that adjust the site layout based on the viewer’s screen dimensions. A responsive web design uses flexible images, flexible layouts and cascading style sheet (CSS3) media queries to determine which resolution of a device it needs to use.

Responsive design pages use grid coordinates for layout and proportions for images instead of challenging fixed-width parameters. Using proportions instead of fixed-width parameters and a flexible grid layout creates a fluid layout that will automatically resize to fit the dimensions of the display. Now we can easily adjust images and ensure that layouts amend to the device. It’s the perfect solution for devices that switch from portrait orientation to landscape in an instant or for when users switch from a desktop to an iPad.

Media queries are an essential component of responsive design. Without media queries, fluid layouts could not adapt to the endless number of screen sizes on every device. Fluid layouts sometimes appear unreadable on mobile devices and too stretched on desktop displays. Media queries enable us to adapt font to the specs of the device and specify when a certain style takes effect, crafting an enjoyable reading experience for viewers. With media queries, we can target device types and further inspect the physical characteristics of the device. CSS3 delivers expanded query capabilities that allow style sheets to align with a device’s display and serve a desktop, tablet or smartphone style sheet based on the query response.

This functionality means that instead of building a special mobile version of a website or an app (which often requires writing completely new code) developers can easily create multiple style sheets for the same web page. As a result, code is re-purposed instead of rewritten, which saves considerable time and money.

Is responsive design right for every site?

Ultimately, the benefits to responsive design are clear: You create a website one time in the beginning and it automatically adjusts to almost any screen type and size. It offers a simple way to reach multiple viewers across a variety of platforms and allows for a seamless, user-friendly experience.

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Our best advice is that you log into your WordPress installation and change all administrator passwords to something that meets recommended WordPress security standards. These standards are typical of any secure password’s: both uppercase and lowercase letters, a minimum of eight characters long and including special characters such as @#$%%. I also highly recommend that you change your WordPress username from “Admin” to a more secure personal username.

At this point in time, authorities do not know who is behind the current onslaught of attacks but are tracing the IP addresses in an attempt to locate the source. This attack began slowly last week, then died off before picking back up yesterday morning. The symptoms that your site has been attacked are a very slow backend on your WordPress website, or a complete inability to log in. In some cases your site could even intermittently go down completely for short periods.

If you want to add an additional layer of security there are several WordPress security plugin’s on the market that I highly recommend. Here is the short list of the recommended plugins.

• #1 – Bulletproof Security – Download
• #2 – Better WP Security – Download
• #3 – Wordfence Security – Download

Adding one of the above plugins will greatly risk your vulnerability to attack, but as always, it is great to have a complete backup of your website!

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Welcome to the brand new digITech Web Design Offices!

We are proud to announce the launch of our brand new corporate headquarters located at 7703 North Lamar Boulevard, Suite 510.  Austin, TX 78752.  We have outgrew our old space and are welcoming the change to this new larger office space.  We look forward to meeting all of our clients at our new office location.

Need help finding us? Here is a map!

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Here is the tweet posted by ANON, which was promptly taken down by officials at twitter:

” Anonymous Own3r ?@AnonymousOwn3r
#tangodown http://www.godaddy.com/ by @AnonymousOwn3r “

This is from the official twitter account of ANON https://twitter.com/AnonOpsLegion/ which they explicitly state they are upset at the fact Godaddy seems to be sponsoring censorship of the internet which has caused them to take this action.

In there tweet they are reporting, Tangodown, which I have to say in dealing with Godaddy in the past as a web developer is quite funny since they can be an absolute nightmare to work with, but clients who still host their websites on Godaddy I am sure do not think this situation is funny at all.

So for now, this is what Godaddy.com looks like

Read more about the hacker group ANON click here

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Wiseman Family Practice

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We are honored to announce the featured post about our company on the University of Texas at Austin’s continuing education website! The beautifully written article about digITech Web Design illustrates how the amazing programs offered by the University of Texas in partnership with the City of Austin Small Business Development Program are helping to make Austin one of the best places in the country to start a small business.

digITech Web Design Makes a Splash

Darryl Stevens, CEO of digITech Web Design founded the company in April of 2011 with the idea and vision that digITech would be a business FOR the city. With this idea in mind, the Austin Web Design firm was placed in a position to be able to give back to the community through working with the For The City Network and several local area Churches we have been able to give back a small portion of what has been so gracefully given to us to help Austin area non-profit’s further their mission.

Special Thanks to the University of Texas at Austin

We want to thank the extremely helpful individuals at the University of Texas at Austin for publishing this wonderful article about the success of digITech and the rapid growth of the Austin Web Design Firm’s Texas reach. The programs offered by the University of Texas have helped to provide us with an in depth knowledge and understanding of technology and marketing strategies that have helped to make digITech the industry leading Austin Web Design firm!

View the Full Article on the University of Texas Website.

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I recently got back from a trip to New York City and took some amazing pictures from the Top of the Rock of the Empire State Building and Lower Manhattan. The pictures were so amazing that I feel it is my duty to make them available to the public sized accordingly to the most popular desktop background wallaper sizes. The free New York City background wallpaper below is the first of 5 to come taken from the Top of the Rock at the Rockefeller Plaza. I hope you enjoy!

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Free New York City Background Wallpapers

DOWNLOAD NOW

1280 x 1024
1280 x 800 Widescreen
1600 x 900 Widescreen
1920 x 1200 Widescreen

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Free New York City Background Wallpapers

Brought to you by digITech Web Design, the Austin Web Design and Austin SEO experts providing top notch website design, search engine optimization and social media integration to Austin, TX and the World!

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Thinking about hosting your website with GoDaddy? THINK AGAIN! Web Professionals agree that GoDaddy is one of the worst web hosting companies on the market. There are many reasons why we also believe that GoDaddy is the Worst Hosting Company on the market, and this article is going to highlight some practical examples of real incidents we have had with GoDaddy and their support team.

Some of the reasons why GoDaddy is the Worst Hosting Company

• Extremely slow page load speeds
• Overloaded servers, GoDaddy packs hundreds on customers onto single shared servers.
• Nickeled and Dimed – Have a problem? Sure they can fix it, just pay them more and give them 48 hours.
• Horrible user interface – If you are wanting CPanel, or something user friendly, you wont get it.
• Automatic Backups Included? Yes, for another $10 a month. GoDaddy loves to charge extra for standard services

Real life example of a recent interaction between our company and GoDaddy

ins*****: We restarted our server, they said it could take up to 30 minutes, its been 45, this is rediculous our entire site is down, 30 minutes for a restart?
Ro**** W-Server Concierge: I’m looking it up now. It’ll take a minute or two for me to find the information.

Those are real life transcripts folks, and it gets worse. Need we say more? Still want to go with GoDaddy?

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Once again it looks like Google has made some changes to their algorithm for ranking websites in their SERP. Google has Flip-Flopped according to Website Magazine on some of their previous changes and while it looks like these particular changes will most greatly affect websites which run Google Ad-Words, these changes are important to note for all web developers and SEO professionals and I have already adjusted my website accordingly.

According to Google’s official release on the webmaster central blog, the new page layout algorithm change puts a very heavy emphasis on content that is “Above The Fold”, meaning the visible content a user will see on your website without having to scroll down. Google is stating that this particular change has been enacted to help users find accurate content after clicking a link from their SERP, without having to scroll down or search for the relevant content embedded somewhere on the website behind ads and other irrelevant information. They are stating that this entire change has been made to help the user experience.

Suggested Changes To Make

In practical application what this means for you and your website is that you want to have relevant content, in particular the main keywords you are targeting embedded in an h1 tag, with additional relevant textual content and targeted keywords in a central location above the fold of your website. Googles algorithm is now giving more weight to any content which appears Above The Fold in primary view for all visitors.

Google has stated that this change will affect less that 1 percent or 1/100 searches globally, but our view here at digITech is we want to make every optimal change to ensure the highest SEO rankings for our Austin Web Design clients.

Resources and Helpful Links

• Googles Official Webmasters Blog
• Website Magazine Algorithm Updates
• Google Browser Size Tool

Above The Fold Optimized Site Example

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