Responsive Website Design

What is Mobile Friendly, or responsive website design and why does it matter to your site visitors?

More and more people are accessing the internet through mobile devices, like iPhones, smartphones, windows and android phones. Additionally, tablet pc’s, netbooks and smart TV’s with built in-browsers provide alternative ways from the traditional PC for people to access your website – in fact:

Google confirms : More browsing traffic comes from Mobile devices than the desktop!
http://searchengineland.com/its-official-google-says-more-searches-now-on-mobile-than-on-desktop-220369

So simply put – if you are not using mobile friendly website design, then you are missing out, on visitors, new customers and potential sales!

The problem is, each of these devices has different screen sizes and capabilities so if you haven’t changed your website design in the last few years, and just published your website in the old fashioned way (i.e., ‘one size to fit all’) then visitors using any of these mobile devices will probably have quite a difficult time viewing and navigating through your site properly – or you may find whole parts of it don’t work on certain devices (like Flash on iPhones/iPads etc).

That means, they may never see your content, or purchase anything from your site, or even contact you – they’ll most likely simply give up in frustration and move straight along to your competitor who DOES have a mobile friendly website!

How Responsive Website Design Helps deliver traffic

Responsive website design addresses this issue by using media queries to detect what type of device (i.e., iPhone or tablet or pc) your visitor is using to view your site, and automatically to ‘respond’ and serve a version of your website which has been designed with fluid grids and CSS3 stylesheets to adjust its content to fit the available screen size, and orientation, of the device, whether that’s a 4 inch mobile phone screen held in portrait mode, or a 10 inch tablet held in landscape mode, or a 23 inch pc monitor (you get the idea).

So rather than forcing the user to adjust to static site dimensions, or one size fits all, your site adjusts to the user and is designed to be ‘device agnostic’ with the design and content optimised for the device that’s viewing the page (effectively serving multiple versions of your site with device specific content, or less image or media heavy content).

Further, very often, best practice responsive design will take account not just of resizing, but of delivering different, optimised traffic to different devices. For example, whilst displaying a large gallery may be appropriate for viewing on a PC, does a visitor on a mobile phone really want to download a large amount of images? What about detecting that a phone is being used instead of a desktop, and automatically displaying an easy button so that the user can just click to dial, rather than having to look up the number? Truly responsive design will take the different needs and experiences of your visitors, depending on your device, into account, and that’s what we do here at Meerkat Solutions, to deliver the best possible experience to your visitors, whether mobile, or on tablets, PC’s etc.

The bottom line, websites we design, adjust to look as well as possible, and serve appropriate content, as fast as possible, to your visitor on whatever device they’re on – and they have a much better experience on your site!

Given that traffic from mobile devices is now overtaking traffic from desktop PC’s in we strongly encourage you to give your visitors the best experience and invest in a responsive website design (or redesign) of your website.

We now develop ALL new sites with mobile friendly, responsive design as standard and we encourage existing clients with older non-responsive sites to upgrade these sites as soon as possible!

If your current website is not responsive, why not talk to us about what’s possible and ensure you don’t lose traffic and clients who are frustrated with your site not working properly on their mobile devices?