Saved Me Hundreds of Hours

I have a large informational website with well over 100 long pages, hundreds of internal links, many images,and a complex menu structure. My format does not lend itself to out-of-the-box mobile themes.

I was facing the unpleasant prospect of rebuilding the entire site on a responsive theme. I am a writer, not a programmer, so this would have taken me a long time that I’d rather put into adding content. I also would have spent several hundred dollars hiring a WordPress developer to set up and customize the new mobile-responsive theme.

A friend with a site far larger than mine recommended Duda — the paid version. Within a few hours, with a little tweaking, a had a functional, not-bad-looking mobile site up and running. I upgraded from the $10/month version to the lifetime subscription for $159. Since my site generates substantial ad revenues, the price is trivial. For others, this could be a stumbling block.

The solution is far from perfect. The drag-and-drop editor is a little buggy. The “edit” view does not always match the “preview” view, which can be frustrating. E-Commerce does not work (I sell a couple of downloads on the original site). Help pages rarely address issues I’ve had and e-mail support has been spotty.

On the positive side, the pre-set templates work well. With less than a day’s work, I was able to modify the site template and individual pages to look pretty good. I replaced some plug-in elements that did not work — such as contact forms and “share this site” with free Duda add-ons, which work well.

Also my AdSense ads work perfectly and were easy to format and place where I wanted on the Duda template. Mobile page views now account for 40% of my traffic, but only 12% of revenue, as mobile CTRs are pretty lousy. On the other hand, mobile ad revenue paid for my life-time subscription in less than a month.

Bottom line: I now have functional and reasonably attractive mobile site that updates in real time with no input from me. Duda is in this game for the long haul and adds new add-on features regularly. I am hopeful that some of the editing bugs will get fixed over time. I do very well now in Google’s mobile search ranking. I’m very happy to go back to writing and can forget about responsive site design until something better comes along.