Responsive website design has been around a few years now. It came about because of the iPhone, basically. Up until 2005, viewing a website on a phone wasn't a great experience. It was slow and didn't look or even work right. Then you started seeing "mobile versions" of websites pop up. This worked alright but it ended up creating a duplicate website. The same content was on two different pages and Google just didn't like that, of course.
What fueled the mobile revolution even more was improved versions of phones. The screens got a little bigger and that made viewing websites easier. Then more phones came out and the old phones, which finally made viewing websites easier got into more people's hands since they could afford second hand phones. Then, finally, in 2015 we started seeing more traffic coming from mobile devices than desktop devices. This only makes sense because it's a LOT cheaper to own a small, handheld computer than a desktop or laptop computer and all these people finally had easy access to the Web.
As a business owner, maybe you missed that whole revolution. You might still have a website that doesn't work well on mobile devices. People have to zoom in and move the page around to see it. That's not good.
Also, last year was Mobilegeddon, which is when Google officially started showing mobile responsive websites to people who were using mobile devices. This meant that if someone did a search on a mobile device, Google would naturally show them websites that worked well on the device they were using. Mobile responsive websites then got a boost and still do receive that boost... which you're not taking advantage of - maybe your competition is, though.
What might happen next is screen sizes going back to the iPhone 5 size. I read something about that today and it makes sense... people's hands are only so big and they're not getting bigger. If devices are too large, they become less easy to use. This means that screen sizes will start to normalize and there will be just a few standard screen sizes of mobile devices in the future.
So that was a little history lesson for you but right now we have people using mobile devices more than ever to access websites. As a business owner, your website does not work well on the devices that most people are using.
Here's a great article from Google on this topic (and this is back from 2012 even):
What Users Want Most from Mobile Sites Today (thinkwithgoogle.com)
If you want to reach people on mobile, you've got to start with the basics — a mobile site. Though it seems obvious, this study found that 96% of consumers have encountered sites that weren't designed with mobile in mind. It also found that when it happens, it can be bad for business — 48% reported feeling frustrated and annoyed.
[...]
Mobile-friendly sites turn users into customers
The fastest path to mobile customers is through a mobile-friendly site. If your site offers a great mobile experience, users are more likely to make a purchase.
When they visited a mobile-friendly site, 74% of people say they're more likely to return to that site in the future
67% of mobile users say that when they visit a mobile-friendly site, they're more likely to buy a site's product or serviceNot having a mobile-friendly site helps your competitors
People just move on to other websites - a website that isn't your website. They associate being frustrated with your brand name.
It's getting a little easier but it's still a challenge. If someone tells you differently, then they're not doing all they should be doing to make sure your website is set up correctly.
Websites need to be designed to be responsive and use the right frameworks and themes and so forth but they also need to be human tested. We have a Testing Department for this purpose (and we've had this department for years). We also do what we call "crowd testing" which brings in every employee we have. Before a website launches, we have all employees get on their devices and test websites. This is one extra step we do to make sure websites look and work correctly on mobile devices.
It's, of course, not possible to test every possible website visitor environment since there are lots of web browsers with lots of versions and different operating systems and devices out there but we test the main ones. You also have to take into account which browser plugins people might have installed. And then there are obscure devices like Playstations, XBoxes, Roku boxes and so forth that people are using to browse the Web. We can see when we look at website statistics that there are sometimes up to 500 devices or more being used to browse websites!
The big problem we have at Webstix is educating our clients about all we do. Our clients are, of course, most concerned with the outcome, not the process. They just want a website that works, of course. They often don't realize all the steps and procedures we have in place to make sure they get the best website possible. Our problem is that we're terrible at explaining our value. When a project goes off without a hitch, we're usually not celebrated too much but behind our walls, we know all that made a website launch successful.
We've been doing website design about 15 years now. We've worked at it. Whenever a problem would come up, we'd have meetings and spend time coming up with a procedure to make sure that problem never happens again. We care about the quality of websites we deliver. We've had a lot of meetings, let me tell you. The end result is our clients get a consistent, streamlined process of quality work. If something does go wrong, we're there to support our work, too!
Now look at us - we're concentrating on things like Google PageSpeed scores when our competition doesn't seem to be able to deliver websites that have passing scores. We've invested time and resources in to figuring that out and we rock!
We even deliver the artwork and files we used to create your website when the work is done. Our websites are not done at launch - no way. We have post-launch procedures and follow that need to be done both at launch and post-launch.
Our testers, our crowd testing, our procedures and years of expert experience are all part the deliverables of any website project we do. Our clients benefit from all of that when they hire Webstix to work for them.
You now know why you need a responsive website (so that your website works well on mobile devices... which is what your customers have) and you now know why Webstix is the best choice for website design. We're sorry if we're not good at tooting our own horn and showing our value. We'll try to get better at that but it's really not in our nature to brag and we're too busy to take time to do that. Well, not too busy but we just have better things to do!
If you're serious about your website and want it to work for your business, then contact us today and let's talk. Let's see if we're a good fit.
-Tony
