Mobile First Website Design

Changes in the industry that you should know:

The use of mobile phones has become the main platform used by a majority of users across the U.S. as a communication medium (especially ages 15-50). According to the latest statistics there are more people who communicate through SMS than there are through email, and there are more people who own a mobile phone than credit cards or computers.

Naturally, this has led business owners to try and tap into this market. The main viable avenues which have gained a lot of popularity in the recent past are mobile applications (apps) and mobile-optimized websites. This has led to a debate in some circles, on which method is better, especially if you intend to use only one. 

Since July 1st 2019, mobile-first indexing was enabled by default for all new websites (new to the web or previously unknown to Google Search). For older or existing websites ranking and indexing was switched to mobile-first indexing. Mobile-first indexing means Google predominantly uses the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking. Historically, the index primarily used the desktop version of a page's content when evaluating the relevance of a page to a user's query. Since the majority of users now access Google Search with a mobile device, Googlebot primarily crawls and indexes pages with the smartphone agent going forward.

But it's not only Google. The same goes for all the major search engines, including Bing, Yahoo, Alexa, Siri, Cortana, ask, etc. Any business that wants exposure needs to think first the mobile experience and secondary the desktop version.

Website Design for Mobile Targeting

When comes to any website design project, our company uses the native approach for mobile devices. All of our website designs included multiple screen views in order to create the same or similar views for the same content for different devices. Since 2014 we start using responsive technologies and since 2020 gone even deeper to complete custom mobile views for multiple devices and resolutions. That means that any website can now have different views, fonts, designs, graphics, images, and content based on the device. This is the best approach for marketing and user experience. No more huge empty spaces, infinite scrolls, or zoom-in for reading. The final result is a crispy clean layout, easy to read, and compatible with the rules that search engines are asking for.

What is Responsive Web Design?

Responsive web design (RWD) is an approach to web design that makes web pages render well on a variety of devices and window or screen sizes from minimum to maximum display size. Recent work also considers the viewer proximity as part of the viewing context as an extension of RWD. Content, design, and performance are necessary across all devices to ensure usability and satisfaction.

A site designed with RWD adapts the layout to the viewing environment by using fluid, proportion-based grids, flexible images, and CSS3 media queries, an extension of the @media rule, in the following ways:

• The fluid grid concept calls for page element sizing to be in relative units like percentages, rather than absolute units like pixels or points.
• Flexible images are also sized in relative units, so as to prevent them from displaying outside their containing element.
• Media queries allow the page to use different CSS style rules based on the characteristics of the device the site is being displayed on, e.g. width of the rendering surface (browser window width or physical display size).
• Responsive layouts automatically adjust and adapt to any device screen size, whether it is a desktop, a laptop, a tablet, or a mobile phone.
• Responsive web design has become more important as the amount of mobile device users have come to account for more than half of total internet traffic. In 2015, for instance, Google announced Mobilegeddon and started to boost the ratings of mobile-friendly sites if the search was made from a mobile device. Responsive web design is an example of user interface plasticity.

What is the cost of a mobile website design?

The cost of a mobile-friendly or mobile-first website design is exactly the same in most cases as a desktop website design. Smart techniques and specific software are taking care of most of the hard work that was required a few years back in order to have the correct layout. There is custom work involved in very few cases that we would like i.e. to hide a piece of repeated information from the user.

A nice example is on our own website: If you browse it from your desktop or from a large tablet you will notice the sidebar with the secondary menu, the blog links below, and some additional banners. This content though is hidden from a mobile device or even from a small tablet, in order to save space and at the same time to reduce the bandwidth usage for our visitors. We take into consideration the fact that the users are paying for these megabytes of data every time plus the realization that they want their content fast (still most mobile networks are slower than a cable connection) and through this strategy, we manage to give them perfect experience on the mobile and a little different - with more content - on the desktop.

 

What we can do for you:

The Web Empire can create the right solution for your mobile-first strategy. Either if you have a website now or you plan to create one, we can analyze what your needs are according to your target market, your products or services, and how possible it is to transform your whole vision into a mobile eye-catching solution.

Our awarded website design services are always results-driven,  focusing on providing the best results for you and your business.