Quote Originally Posted by spminis View Post
I agree with you in principle but I don't see how your post relates to this plug in. I think you've misunderstood the point of the plug in because I don't consider it as entertainment or a trinket to glitz up on my website which is fairly bare bones.

I didn't put it on my site for people to play around with "skins" but rather as a practical solution to the problem on not being able to make a responsive template look the way I want it to on computers and mobile devices (I'm really a novice). The switch skins was an easy way out of the problem by allowing me to have a template for the website when viewed on computer and a separate template for mobile devices. Also, customers can still use the website view on a mobile device and vice versa. I've had it on my site for a few weeks now and sales are not down.

My site is www.spminiatures.com if you want to see how the switch skins is used in a practical way. I'm still not thrilled with the results and I'm still working on it but the customers aren't complaining.

I'm still waiting for a response to a question I posted a couple of days ago. I hope to get an answer.
Thanks

Carol
The point I am making relates perfectly to this subject - but looks at it from the perspective of how CUSTOMERS react to websites... which (to me anyway) is the whole point of running an online shop.

I design my sites to do two core things:

1. Attract, keep and derive income from paying customers, and to make their visit as safe, easy, quick and logical as possible.
2. Build the site on a "best-practice" principle, leveraging the software to comply with contemporary protocols that "govern" and "guide" the structure of the underlying technology.

As far as point # "2" is concerned, the research and knowledge-base on what is commonly referred to as the User Experience (UX), is extensive, and today is considered (by Google in particular) to be core to achieving top rankings on search results. Google (and all other search repositories and web data indexes) can only "evaluate" the facets of a site's "UX" by analysing the underlying technology. So if the technology is "clunky", redundant or "bloated", search engines will regard the site as "unfriendly for humans" and apply lower search rankings - usually beyond page 3 of any search results. In some cases, Google will re-allocate archived data to their Secondary Index if there is a history of "bad technical practice" on a website, or no evidence that the site is being "attended to in order to meet general compliance". If you end up in the Google Secondary Index, getting out of it is a mammoth task. Google rarely features results in the Secondary Indexes.

It is also essential that the technology AUTOMATES anticipated features - such as whether a person is on a desktop or a mobile. Google will not see (or even consider) your "manual" instruction to visitors to "switch" to the mobile template, and will apply its evaluations to the site as it stands.

So while your site kinda lets people know that there is a manually-operated "switch" to a mobile-friendly area, how can you be sure that:-

a) They will see it and activate it (right now it's way over to the RIGHT, so if the visitor is on a mobile device already, he/she won't see it easily.)
b) Google may find it and regard it (perhaps) as some kind of "duplicate" content.

All in all, it's bad practice to do what you are attempting - if (of course) your objective is to attract customers, get good rankings on search engines, sell products and make profits.

To apply sticking-plaster fixes for "personal" reasons and preferences is, in my opinion, not the way to manage an ecommerce venture. Compliance is essential.