4 Expensive Reasons To Use a Mobile Website Design Company
by Andrew Millar
Using a mobile website design company to create a responsive website for your business is not a fun option. It is a necessity.
Why?
Because back in the day your home was high tech if you had a desktop computer. And, these were not today’s masterminds that can control every function within your home. No, these were the shockingly huge ones which required a large desk, extra air conditioning and had a tiny screen which glowed green and typed in white. Oh, how far we have come!
Now, our computers aren’t just word processors. For all intents and purposes, they’ve become lifelines. They’re carried everywhere – literally. The “desktop” is nearly archaic. Laptops, smartphones and tablets rule the day – each with their own screen size and pixel resolution.
Whether you want to face it or not, mobile devices are here to stay. Responsive designs are imperative to your business’ success. Not having one is like telling over 50 percent of the population that you just don’t want their business. More than 65 percent of mobile users who visit a mobile friendly site say they are more likely to become customers (Google, Sterling Research and SmithGeiger, What Users Want Most From Mobile Sites Today, July 2012. The report surveyed 1,088 US adult smartphone Internet users.)
Don’t have a mobile website design company creating a mobile site for your visitors? Just wave goodbye to those prospects.
What exactly is a responsive design?
A responsive website responds to its environment. It’s that simple. It is created with fluid grids which adjust based on screen size. In this case, the website lives in one central location.
An adaptive site can also be mobile friendly. But unlike a responsive site, an adaptive site is created with multiple fixed-width layouts. This means your site would be created in multiple versions, requiring each version to have its own location. There are multiple problems with this option, but the biggest are:
- Look – When your mobile website design company creates a responsive site, your website will be consistently branded, but will change its display based on the screen. In a lot of ways this is the same as an adaptive site. The difference is, the responsive site will scale by algorithms, meaning the version loaded on an Android screen will be different than the one loaded on an iPhone. With an adaptive site, the same fixed width version will load and simply be stretched to fit, disrupting how the site looks.
- SEO – Google determines your site’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Rank by crawling it for relevant keywords and long tail keywords. It also determines your site’s rank by number of visits your site receives. When you have an adaptive site, Google has to crawl multiple sites. And, each version of your site has its own analytics. The number of visits you receive on different versions are not compiled into one big sum increasing your rank. They’re considered separately.
- Sharing – Social Media has turned your consumers into your advertisers. But, when your consumers share your site through their mobile device, it doesn’t necessarily appear how you would like. If you have an adaptive site, the version shared will reflect the user’s device. It won’t be optimized for all those who are seeing it.
- Relevancy – Similar to the SEO issue, when you create an adaptive site you’re creating multiple versions of your site. Often this means each version of your site is slightly different. Not all the same pages from the desktop version exist within the mobile version. As mobile users search your site, they might discover pages with the information they need within the desktop version. But when they try to access them, your adaptive site will redirect them to the mobile version.