If there's one thing we get asked often here at BurstingBox, it's "Can you make our website mobile friendly?" and nine times out of ten, the customer has the impression that doing so is simply the case of us pressing a button, but that's far from reality.
The beginning of mobile website design
The old way of having a mobile friendly website was in fact to have two separate websites, one for desktop and one for smaller devices. You may remember and still see old mobile websites which can be recognised by the use of a subdomain like: m.yourwebsite.co.uk, this is a clear identifer of a separate mobile site.
As you can imagine, this isn't a great solution as it came with its own headaches such as having to maintain and host two websites (which cost more time and money), as well as Google penalising you for having duplicate content unless you rewrote all of your content for mobile.
Mobile web design has come a long way since then, mainly due to Google pushing the standards of mobile web design to demand a better experience for the user. These standards are great for website designers like BurstingBox as it allows us to adhere to the standards that Google put in place so that we can build a good looking and high performing website for our customers.
What is modern mobile web design?
At present day, mobile friendly website design is often referred to as ‘responsive or ‘fluid’ web design, which basically means that the layout and content of the website responds to what ever device it is being displayed on.
So be it a desktop computer or a mobile phone, you will have one optimised website that understands what device it’s being viewed on, and responds by adjusting content to be optimised so that you can view everything you need to without compromising on user experience.
Should I make my website mobile friendly or have a new website?
Because of the potential amount of work involved (depending on how old your website is), in our experience it is much more cost effective to have a new website than to have your older one converted. This is because web technologies are evolving daily, and these developments can hugely improve your website’s performance for search engines as well as users.
Our advice would be to make sure you have a mobile friendly website no matter what, because after all, we use our mobile phones a lot more than our computers, especially when browsing the web.
So when you or your web team are updating your website, always bear in mind how it will be displayed for mobile visitors and make sure it looks good on all devices.