Well before I answer that it might be worth noting the following quote from Digital Trends…

“According to a recent report by analyst Mary Meeker, mobile devices running IOS and Android now account for 45 percent of browsing, compared to just 35 percent for Windows machines.”

People browsing the internet on mobile devices has grown exponentially as you would expect, it has also grown very fast and will continue to do so, but viewing a website on a mobile device such as an iPhone is somewhat awkward due to the fact that websites were traditionally designed for laptop and desktop screens, they’re big and they’re difficult to read and navigate through on the small screens of mobile devices. In a nutshell,  responsive websites are designed to adapt to those smaller screens, the content of the website is scaled and rearranged into different layouts best suited to whatever screen size the website is being viewed on.  The majority of websites aren’t responsive but more and more are cropping up and the popularity of them is becoming self-evident. The most popular free theme on WordPress.org is “Responsive” and it does exactly what it’s title suggests.

So back to our question, do you need one? Well, taking into account the growth of mobile browsing I would have to say Yes, you probably do. Unfortunately it’s very difficult to change an existing website to be responsive. Your site is probably going to have to be redone from scratch even if you don’t want the overall design changed. If you’re looking at  getting a new website anyway then you’re in a somewhat better position, and you should talk to your developer about your new website being responsive. However custom-built responsive websites aren’t cheap. Making a responsive website is a lot of work and it’s going to cost you more than a static site would.

But I can’t afford a new fancy schmancy responsive website!

If you have a WordPress site then you have more options so you’re not going to be hopelessly stuck in a non-responsive place! I’ve already mentioned a free theme on WordPress.org. There are other responsive free themes on there, and you will find many premium themes from the big theme shops such as WooThemes and Elegant Themes that are now responsive. There’s also quite a few on Theme Forest. All these themes are very reasonably priced. You can then install them yourself, or contact a WordPress installation specialist and hire them to do it for you. This is obviously much cheaper than getting a custom site designed from scratch. I have recently begun offering WordPress Installation Services so you can contact me here for a quote.

I LOVE my website, I don’t even want a new one!

Well if that’s you then once again if you’re running WordPress you’re lucky! There are some excellent plugins available to make your site mobile friendly and people accessing your site from their mobile device will have the option to view either the mobile version of your site, or the desktop version. I have used WPTouch for my clients and thoroughly recommend it.

There is a free version which you can download here to try it out, and if you decide you need more functionality then you can upgrade. Here are the available packages.

But your website isn’t even Responsive!

I know I know, I’m not practicing what I preach, or at least don’t appear to be, I’m a busy designer and haven’t got around to it blah blah!  I am actually in the process of redesigning my website, and will be launching the responsive version very soon. In the meantime leave a comment and let me know what you think about responsive websites, and take a look at these examples of the best responsive sites by NetMagazine.

All of these WordPress plugins are free and all of them are regularly updated so they’re compatible with the newest version of WordPress.

Security

Wordfence Security

There are a whole bunch of security plugins and many of them require upgrade to paid versions to really be of any use. I recently found Wordfence and was really blown away by the amount of features in the free version. There is a paid version of this plugin but most of you won’t need it. Wordfence includes a firewall, anti-virus scanning, malicious URL scanning and many more features. I’ll be using it on all my clients sites from now on. Click here to read about it on WordPress.org.

Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin

I love this plugin for its simplicity and effectiveness. One of the main problems with WordPress blogs are the nasty spam comments that get left by automated spam bots. The Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin will prevent 99% of all this spam and having used it on many of my clients sites I can verify it does work brilliantly. The plugin adds a checkbox to the comments form that users have to click to verify they are a real person and the checkbox is checked before submission of the comment so there is no danger of a real comment getting lost. Click here to find out more.

 SEO

WordPress SEO

WordPress SEO by Yoast is one of the most powerful, feature rich plugins out there, so although WordPress is pretty great at SEO out of the box there’s no harm in giving it an extra boost with an SEO plugin, the problem is there are so many of them it’s hard to know which one to choose. I spent a while researching this before I settled on WordPress SEO by Yoast and I have now used it on several of my clients sites.  SEO plugins aren’t of the kind that you can switch them on and go, you have to be prepared to spend time configuring and working with it. WordPress SEO by Yoast however has very comprehensive documentation which is worthwhile reading if you want to get the most out of this plugin.

Backing Up

Snapshot Backup

Backing up your WordPress blog is one of those things that might get shoved to the bottom of the to-do list, but it really is one of the most important things of all. Like always there are a host of plugins to help you but having tried out lots of them I’ve been the most happy with Snapshot Backup which really makes the whole backing up process very easy, and can be automated.  Find it here.

Speed

W3 Total Cache

Chances are you have heard of W3 Total Cache but I’m going to mention it anyway. Used by millions of WordPress users to significantly speed up the load time of their website, and now installs automatically with WordPress through certain web hosting companies such as Hostgator.

I had worked with meta boxes in my last project and had somewhat fallen in love with them. The project had required a complicated page layout that the client was never going to be able to handle updating by themselves if it had been hard coded, so custom meta boxes provided a perfect solution. Now they can upload files, add amazon affiliate links, type bullet points and everything appears magically in the correct place on the page. What’s not to love! For my purposes though I wanted to be able to have a custom post type for my portfolio and just have the meta boxes appear on those posts. This tutorial by Richard Shepherd proved to be very valuable, but I wanted to include the Meta Box Plugin by Rilwis which I loved using in the previous project I mentioned so I left out step 3 of Richard’s tutorial and used the Meta Box Plugin instead.

On the left is the Portfolio Custom Post Type, and on the right is how the Portfolio entry looks on the front end.

You can see the result by clicking on any of the images on this page.

Because I have a large portfolio I wanted it to be easy to put up new additions so I decided to make the portfolio a custom post type and used meta boxes for the various fields in the website portfolio section. As of now the Website Portfolio is done, minus the descriptions of each site, and the Branding Portfolio is done. In the coming days I’ll be adding the Social Media, and Email Portfolios, plus an extra section to showcase the extensive image editing I’ve done over the years.