Be Responsive

You can’t design a website without considering how it will look on mobile. According to Search Engine Watch, a recent Google survey of mobiles users found that 72% say it’s important for websites to be mobile-friendly. That’s why we have switched almost completely to WordPress development with templates that are responsive and mobile-friendly. It’s always been a pain to get websites to view across all browsers and devices, and the parameters seem like they change daily. So I choose templates with built in responsiveness and media queries that save me a lot of headaches. But because I’m a designer, I’m picky picky picky, and therefore constantly tweaking the way the things look across screen sizes. I am therefore becoming well-versed in the mobile query and spend a lot of time making sure our websites look good whether is at 320 pixels or 2560 pixels wide.

I always tell our clients that websites have a shelf life of 3-5 years. Many of the websites we produced a few years ago weren’t responsive. They might display and be usable on mobile, but they aren’t necessarily EASY to use on mobile. The nice thing about WordPress sites is you can update the templates and retain all the data. It’s not always ready to go right out of the box, the new template often needs to be styled in order for it to still look the way you want. The good news is you don’t need to start from scratch. You can take an outdated site and apply a responsive template to it, and you have a site that functions well across the latest devices and browsers. WordPress is so widely used now (webdesignwestmi.com/wordpress-websites-woohoo), it is sure to be around for a while and continually tweaked as technologies change. According to w3techs.com, “WordPress is used by 60.0% of all the websites whose content management system we know. This is 21.4% of all websites”.

Responsive web design is also more user friendly than developing an app for mobile. Unless you are a huge brand like twitter, that users return to constantly, building a custom app to make your website more mobile-friendly probably doesn’t make sense (webdesignwestmi.com/responsive-website-design-app). You may be asking too much of the user, that they take the time and download the app. More likely, they will bouce from your website and look for the same product elsewhere on a site that’s more usable.