Shopify Expert Insights

A potential agency partner asked me, "What are your thoughts on front-end frameworks like Bootstrap or Foundation?"

Following my strict no bullshit policy, I told him my opinionated truth. Any good framework is just a set of opinionated standards. Theyre great for inexperienced developers to pick up best practices from more experienced developers, but they can ultimately lead to bloat in any application or website. Since the person using the framework by definition doesnt understand whats going in to it, they cant rightly remove all the unused cruft thats left over.

We use HTML5 Boilerplate - HTML5 Boilerplate - because its the absolute bare minimum of best practices. (Even then there's room for improvement, like concatenating style sheets.) We even took HTML5BP a step further and released our own framework - Responsivize - as a way for people to see what a responsive website built from HTML5BP looks like.

His immediate response: "This all makes sense Kurt."

The problem with SEO is that people view it as a shortcut. Driving traffic is hard, creating content is harder, and advertising is expensive. Naturally, people are lazy, and try to pick up the magic wand of SEO.

The hard truth is that SEO is not a magic wand, and no amount of tweaking H1 tags is going to magically and simultaneously outsmart Google and rocket a website past its probably-more-competent competitors.

That doesn't mean we can't leverage SEO without creating content. You have other options:

1. Optimize your page load time. Since 2010, Google has been incorporating site speed in search rankings. It makes sense, slow websites are a bad experience. Google wants to reward sites with great user experiences. Don't panic, there are dozens of ways to tweak your site to load quicker: http://websiteperformancechecklist.com/
2. Mobile optimize your website. This year, we predict that 50% of web traffic will be from mobile devices. For businesses, that means not having a mobile-optimized website is not just a bad experience for customers, it's potential business suicide.
3. Curate user generated content. Okay, so you don't want to create your own content. It's hard, I get that. That doesn't mean content isn't important. Posting, new, fresh, unique content on your website is still an important and powerful SEO tactic. Ask your customers to give you content. Ask them for reviews, testimonials, and photos. Make it a contest, reward them for the effort. Hell, a contest is good viral content too. Try that.

Of course, building fast, mobile-optimized websites is our thing. Like this one for Verizon - http://fightfomofsf.com/ - where we put to use all of the above tactics to promote the NFL Mobile app.