Part 3 of my Android App Development Journey is all about how I’m a few months in and have little to show for it. It’s disappointing as I was full of enthusiasm and gusto at the start and I seem to have flatlined. A few things have happened since part 2 of my journey and perhaps that’s some consolation.
I went to an intro course on Android app develvopment at Astrolabs. I was hoping for a bit more from the workshop but it was just over 1 hour and I shouldn’t have expected much. The workshop focused on helping people understand technical requirements to build Android apps and how to get setup. But the thing is, I already know all of this and have had Android Studio installed for some time. Still though, it was a step towards better understanding app development for Android so I count this as a positive.
I haven’t done anything like add a newsletter section, broaden target keywords or make changes to the site. In fact, the site has actually improved in rankings since then:
| 18/9/2016 | 14/11/2016 | |
| AU | 20 | 14 |
| NZ | 11 | 10 |
| Global | 15 | 13 |
| AE | 12 | 11 |
| UK | 12 | 10 |
| ZA | 13 | 12 |
| CA | 15 | 11 |
| HK | 12 | 12 |
This is great to see, since my site now ranks on page 1 in 2 countries and apart from HK, rankings improved across the board. So this is all without doing anything on the site and is largely due to highly optimised meta data and the EMD.
This is how people get complacent – when they see rankings improving witout doing anything but in my case, I actually need t obuild the app. I have sketches and wireframes and need to actually put it all together. My excuse has been time. With so many events and things getting busy with work, I have not been able to manage my free time as well and that would ordinarly have been used to work on the app.
Acknowledging the issues is the first step and the next is to take active steps to improve. I am setting myself a new to-do list of 5 tasks with firm milestones:
- Broaden keyword scope, track rankings and optimise the website for these new keywords (most likely “price per piece” and “unit price comparison”. (Due 17 November)
- Add newsletter signup section. (Due 19 November)
- Activate twitter account and begin promoting the app. (Due 17 November)
- Finalise mockups and wireframes and create digital version (Due 26 November)
- Create a working prototype of v1.0 of the app (prototype to run on Marvel) (Due 30 November)
I think this is a workable list – I should be able to report back on 1 December on my progress by that point.
I do understand that the app is simple enough and that if I dedicated an entire weekend to it, I could have it up and running but I want to go through the whole process with a bit more structure (plus I have other things going on in life!).
Let’s go!
