Is Your Website Responsive? Did you know that over 60% of web searches today are made on mobile phones? This isn’t just an interesting stat; it’s a crucial piece of information for anyone who wants their website to be found by prospective customers. To bring in business and attract the attention it deserves, your website needs to be designed in a responsive way. In other words, it needs to work exceptionally well with mobile phone technology. So let’s break down some of the most important ways in which websites with a responsive design achieve their success. Good to Google While there are other search engines out there, it’s plain to see that Google is the big dog. A website that Google likes is a website that will be placed high up in search rankings and that will subsequently get more clicks by prospective customers. Google actually made a monumental shift back in 2015: it started to include mobile compatibility in the list of criteria that had to be fulfilled to be rated as a website of quality. Many of the factors that make for a good user experience when browsing a website on a mobile device are simple and common-sense. For instance, having only vertical scrolling is important– it’s easy to run a finger up or down a screen, but moving horizontally to navigate is not user-friendly. Likewise, the text on a website should be a nice size for the typical mobile user– neither so large that it requires zooming out to take in the whole sentence or paragraph nor so small that users need to fiddle around and zoom right in to see what it says. Even this blog post is informed by this sort of considerate design. If you stop and look at the overall format, you’ll notice that each paragraph is short– never longer than three or four sentences. Classic formatting such as italic text, bold text and underlining is also used to highlight important points and to guide you, the reader, nicely through the content from start to finish. Let’s get technical OK, now let’s get technical for a moment and introduce a very important term: responsive web design(or RWD). Responsive web design is exactly what it sounds like – a particular design of website that respondsto whatever device a user happens to be viewing it on. That means that whether it’s someone looking on a smartphone, a tablet, a laptop, a television or a desktop the website will look good and be easy to use. The concept has been around for coming up to a decade but it’s only now that businesses are starting to really take an interest in it. With the diverse selection of affordable devices now available, RWD is making more and more sense every day. If your website needs a design update to make it responsive to today’s users, or even just a few technical tweaks to improve its Google ranking, contact us here us at Agency PK at [email protected] We’re a design agency based in York and we specialise in creating successful websites through technical web design and development. So don’t get left behind, get in touch…. We’re branding experts, read our blog on branding in a digital world here.