Since UX website design is about providing the best possible interactions with your site it is essential that every site is mobile-friendly.
What is Mobile-First Website Design?
Mobile first web design is building a website starting with the mobile user in mind, then expanding to the desktop version of the website. Historically it has always been the opposite development trajectory, but with 55% of the world now viewing the web through some kind of mobile device and with Google announcing in May 2015 that mobile searches have surpassed desktop searches in the US, it makes sense to start with mobile-first.
Reasons to Use Mobile-Friendly Web Design
User Experience
Have you ever tried to use a website that is not “mobile-friendly” on your cell phone? You probably didn’t stay on that website long, did you? One of our jobs as web developers is to ensure that whoever is interacting with a website is able to find what they need in a simple, easy way. Otherwise, your potential customers may become frustrated and decide to take their business elsewhere. A user having to constantly zoom in on the website just to read the text is a prime example of poor user experience.
Google Rankings
Google prefers mobile-ready websites and will rank mobile-friendly sites higher than non-mobile ready sites. From Google’s perspective, it wants to give the best possible results to its searchers. If someone clicks on a google search result and they cannot read the text because it is too small that user will immediately hit the back button. Google registers this action and will understand that the website it brought the user to is not providing a positive user experience, thus it will decrease that website’s rankings on its search engine results page (SERP). Google has an entire guide dedicated to creating mobile-ready websites.
Conversions
Conversion is an industry term that means the potential customer takes the next step when interacting with your website and online business. This could be a form submission, signing up for your newsletter, or a phone call to your business. In the end, for most people, this is what it all comes down to – converting a potential customer viewing your website to an actual customer? If a website is not mobile-friendly there is an almost zero chance of anyone being able to interact with, not to mention purchase something on, your website.
A Brief History of Mobile Design
Skipping past the text-only era of websites… When people first started building websites they only had basic fixed-width layouts. This was because fluid width web design did not come into play many years later with the invention of styling techniques, referred to in later years as CSS. As CSS developed the W3C community developed something called a media query. First published in 2001 on W3C, a media query is a bit of code within the CSS that can change the website’s styling (for example the width of the website) based on the width of the device?that it is being viewed on. Fast forward to today and we can see how this tool is very useful when developing websites that will be viewed on everything from a TV to cell phone. Now all modern websites utilize media queries to display content differently at different device widths.
Note – Media Queries are not the only method of designing for mobile. You can also create entirely separate style sheets and use javascript to decide which stylesheet to serve based on the width of the device viewing the website.
Need Help With Mobile Design?
CreativeAK can help transform your website from a static width site into a website that utilizes all of the latest principles of Responsive Web Design. We utilize mobile-first design principles to ensure that potential customers always have the best user experience, no matter what device they are using to view your website.
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