You’ve heard the buzz about mobile. You likely have at least one mobile device you use multiple times per day.
The actual statistics on mobile are pretty staggering: - There are 6.8 billion people in the world – 5.1 billion of them now own a cell phone. (2013, Search Engine Watch)
- 28% of Internet usage comes from a mobile phone – it is projected to take over desktop usage by 2014. (2012, Pew Research Center)
- 50% of all local searches (e.g., Cedar Falls bank) are performed on mobile devices (2012, Google)
- 62% of companies that designed a website specifically for mobile had increased sales. (2012, Econsultancy)
- Thousands of screen sizes exist for mobile devices, and the number continues to grow.
So, these statistics aside, how do you decide if you should go for it with a mobile site? Take a look at your current site analytics—what percentage of your site visits are made via a mobile device? If it’s more than 10% (and that number will continue to increase) and your site is not mobile friendly, it’s worth serious consideration, depending on your goals.
Compare the percentage of mobile visits to where they were a year ago—given what you see, where do you think it will be a year from now?
We recommend all of our clients consider responsive design for any new website we build.
With responsive design, your site detects the type of device each site visitor is using. Flexible images and fluid grids then size correctly to fit the screen.
To get a feel for how responsive design works, check out the following sites on your desktop machine. As you view the site, continually make your browser window narrower and narrower and watch how the site content shifts according to your window size:
The main advantages of responsive design are:
- Your site is easily accessible on any type of device.
- You only have one set of content to manage.
- Responsive design is better for SEO than a separate, forked mobile site.
We build our mobile-friendly sites using the
Sitefinity content management system. The Sitefinity system is designed to make responsive development more efficient for our team, while its intuitive interface makes it incredibly easy for to clients to manage their site content.
We believe if you're considering a new website, implementing responsive design is a smart investment.
What do you think? We'd love to hear from you in the comments below.