Mobile Sites & Responsive Websites
Mobile Sites and why do you need a Mobile First website?
- 65%[1] of cell phone owners use their devices to access the internet
- 34% of mobile internet users primarily use their phones for internet access
- Of people who mostly use mobile internet, many don’t own a desktop or laptop computer
Source: Pew Research Center
Responsive Design
Responsive web design doesn’t just mean scaling your sites visual elements for different screen-sizes, the philosophy extends to how you frame your content, emphasize key points of information relevant to the user, and consider the amount of effort it takes to navigate your site via touch. Although there is a higher investment involved, this option is more user friendly with a better long term ROI:
- You only need to make content changes in one place
- Maintain one website without the need for a mobile app
- Visitors see the full site and all its content, no matter what device they’re using
- The content will be presented appropriately whether it’s viewed from a large desktop monitor, a small laptop screen, a tablet, or a smartphone
Separate Mobile Sites
This is an older school of thought that was more prevalent before newer HTML and CSS standards and the saturation of strong mobile frameworks such as Bootstrap. It used to be necessary to build a completely separate app or website, that generally served up under a sub-domain (i.e. mobile.infront.com). Thanks to advances in mobile-first web design and the prevalence of user experience centric web frameworks.
Mobile First Design
Mobile first website design strategy uses a mobile responsive frameworks, but it considers mobile users needs first. Instead of creating a desktop website and then making it work on mobile, you create a website that considers the majority of users on mobile first. When considering mobile first design, speed is a huge factor as well. You can check your mobile page speed with Google’s mobile speed checker. So remember, mobile responsiveness is not enough to keep your visitors on your site. If you want to create a website that your potential clients and Google will love, it’s important to choose mobile first design.
