GOOGLE REVIEWS
PLEASE BE AWARE: This is an old article, and while we think there are still nuggets of good advice included here, it may be out of date. Things move very quickly in the world of Digital Marketing, Lead Generation and Conversion Rate Optimisation - so please see our latest news for the most recent advice on how to get more out of your website and online marketing.
We may be close to a groundbreaking event in the history of technology. It is predicted that within the next year or two there will be more people accessing the internet through mobile devices than desktops.
The facts are clear:
- Ofcom data from the past year shows that 12.5% more adults in the UK are browsing the internet on their phones than the year before, up now to 57%.
- Shipments of tablets were also up in 2014, with 263 million units being shipped worldwide. That’s over three and a half times the population of the UK.
- Search Engine Watch also reports that in 2014 92% of business executives used smartphones for work purposes.
So what does this mean for your business’ website?
It means that, in order to make your website user friendly, it must be responsive. This means that the site will automatically change its layout and content depending on what sized screen it is being viewed on. In the past, visiting websites on a mobile phone had been a real pain – it still is for those websites that are not yet responsive – because the websites just weren’t designed to be viewed on a smaller screen than a desktop or laptop. This meant endless frustration zooming all the way in to see anything, accidentally clicking the wrong links or waiting ages for pages to load because of their data size. Annoying our customers is the last thing we want our site to achieve.
To tackle this, web designers use code that allows for the prioritisation of content on a page, if being viewed on a smaller screen. Menus will often tuck away and multi-column sites will merge into one column, meaning that text and images are made clear to the user. Responsive sites also give lesser priority to large, data-consuming items, such as videos, so that pages load quicker on mobile devices.
The old method of dealing with the issue was to create two sites in parallel, one ‘m.’ suited to mobile, and the other ‘www.’ suited to desktop, but creating and running two sites is often not worth the time and money. Unless you’re a large business/brand, some of whom still rely on this system because of the size of their site.
As we can see from the stats above, the world is mobile and that means your clients are also mobile. Having a website that is properly accessible for your audience is paramount to having the best online presence that you can and having a responsive site is definitely a step in the right direction.
