Mobile Friendly Web Design

A year or two ago most websites, including our own, were not mobile-friendly. Now, with almost 80% of the population accessing websites on a variety of mobile devices, it's essential that the user experience is geared to the screen-size a website is being viewed on rather than expect people to have to constantly scroll up, down, left and right and blow up the content in order to read it.

Some businesses, in the meantime, have opted to create apps to cater to their mobile visitors. More recently, the responsive, mobile-friendly website delivers the same content in different layouts according to the size and orientation of of the monitor, laptop, tablet or smartphone being used.

How does a mobile-friendly website affect content and how it's delivered? The simplest way to explain the responsive layout is that it's made up of a series of rows and columns which slide under each other as the screen-size decreases until, on the smallest smartphone screen, the entire page content is displayed in one long column which does not have to be expanded or scrolled left and right at all. This does mean that how and where you display certain content or sidebar navigation needs to be carefully considered - for example, putting a sidebar on the left of each page would mean that, on a smartphone, one would not see any new page content until scrolling down beyond the sidebar content because, in a single column, that would appear first.

Apart from the obvious better user experience of a mobile-friendly website, there are other reasons for its importance. Google now considers mobile-friendliness as a major factor in its search engine ranking algorithm. Mobile search results and Desktop / Laptop results are different. The overall user experiece of a website is important to Google. The bottom line is that the more user-friendly and mobile-friendly a website is, the higher it will be ranked.