My name is Richard Frank and I come from an agency called Flow communications. We've been building websites for the past 15 years. I'm a web developer, so I actually code for a living and still believe that websites are your most important asset when developing a web presence.

So today, what I'm going to take you through is five key steps. five key areas that I think you should be looking at, you should be asking, either your freelancer, your agency or you're asking yourself, if you're doing the DIY route, on your website development.

The first key phrase is mobile first. So at flow, we've been building websites, as I said, for the last 15 years, in 2010, about 10% of our traffic came from mobile. Today, it's upwards of 60%, more than half of the traffic that appears on a website is mobile based. And that obviously necessitates that when we develop websites, we think about mobile first, you must start thinking about the mobile experience before you even look at a beautiful desktop version, or desktop mock up of the site. So think about mobile first, think about mobile first, because it's important for both Google and for your users, Google actually determines the ranking of your site online. And will index the sites based on a mobile first approach. So it looks at the site from a mobile perspective, to determine how high to rank you should be ranking above your competitors.

When people are searching on a key phrase, such as golf clubs, or something like that, does your website rank above another, and a large determinant of that is Is your website mobile friendly. The second reason is because of course, your users are likely to stick around only if it's mobile friendly. If it's not mobile friendly, and they need to pinch and zoom in order to read some text, they will leave the site very quickly. So it's important from a Google SEO search engine optimization perspective. It is also important from a usability perspective. So my suggestion on what you should do is visit your website right now on a mobile phone, check it but also check it on another phone, check it on a friend's phone or a family members phone because often, agencies and freelancers will build a site specifically tailored to your phone and what you use, but may not be paying as much attention to other devices. There are over 2000 mobile devices in the world with different combinations. So make sure that it's working on a variety of mobile devices, make sure you hold your freelancers agencies or yourself to account when doing that.