It’s never been more important to have a high quality website that is responsive, loads fast, and has great user experience. In the past, you could rank high in search engines with a poorly made site if you had tons of links pointing to it, but I think that is changing and some of the recent initiatives that Google is launching is proof of that.
Let’s take a look at a couple ways that Google is beginning to gauge how well made a website is, then I’ll take a peek in to the future to speculate on where we are heading.
The hamburger icon is a popular icon used by designers to represent a hidden navigation menu that will appear when the user clicks on the icon.
Many designers believe that the icon has achieved universal status and that users understand what the icon represents. Many large websites and brands rely on it from Google to Starbucks.
I believe the icon is far from being universally recognized. If we must use the icon we need to take some additional steps to make it more clear to the user where the hidden menu is located.
Sites that use responsive web design, i.e. sites that serve all devices on the same set of URLs, with each URL serving the same HTML to all devices and using just CSS to change how the page is rendered on the device. This is Google’s recommended configuration.
