{"id":60,"date":"2014-03-10T20:28:57","date_gmt":"2014-03-10T20:28:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jonathonmills.com\/?p=60"},"modified":"2015-08-28T00:20:50","modified_gmt":"2015-08-27T23:20:50","slug":"responsive-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jonathonmills.com\/responsive-design\/","title":{"rendered":"Why responsive design?"},"content":{"rendered":"
It’s an undeniable fact, the web is a constantly changing entity. The way in which we design, develop and enhance sites is constantly changing thanks to ever improving technology and an online community that helps one another more than any i’ve come across so far in my professional career.<\/p>\n
One of the main changes to the way we use the web, has come off the back of the likes of the iPhone and iPad. The increasing trend is to use mobile and tablet in order to browse our favourite websites, which poses the question, should we optimise our websites for the different platforms? The answer is quite simply, yes.<\/p>\n
In the past, you could achieve some form of mobile optimisation by having a separate mobile site that would detect the device being used and would then direct you to that site. This posed two problems:<\/p>\n
So this wasn’t an ideal solution to our problem. Ideally we needed a system that allowed us to have one website, that changed based on a constant between every single device, regardless of manufacturer. Thankfully, we were given media queries<\/a>\u00a0(well, technically we had them for a long time, but browsers didn’t begin to offer support until 2012<\/a>)\u00a0which used screen width to decide which form of the site to present, also allowing us to deliver one version of the site based on a few variables. This was the advent of responsive design.<\/p>\n The next question is then why should we spend extra money making our site ‘responsive’? The best way to justify it, is to look at the figures compiled from the recent IS Scotland e-commerce seminar in Glasgow:<\/p>\n These are just some snippets, but they show how important mobile and tablet already are in the market, that it seems like a poor business decision not to optimise<\/strong> your site for these markets. Remember, users will have different requirements when on your mobile site compared to your desktop, so you need to ensure that they’re receiving the correct experience for their device. Yes, your site will work on an iPhone if not responsive, but everybody knows how frustrating it is to try and navigate around those tiny links.<\/p>\n The other consideration for mobile is Google. The world’s favourite search engine have now divided mobile and desktop searches into two separate entities and you need to make sure your site is ready for both. Mobile searches are on a massive increase<\/a>, so simply optimising your SEO for desktop is no longer enough.<\/p>\n It can be a difficult decision to part with more cash for anything, but if you’re wanting to build an online presence then a responsive site is no longer an extra, it should be considered a necessity. If you choose not to, you’re quite simply missing out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s an undeniable fact, the web is a constantly changing entity. The way in which we design, develop and enhance sites is constantly changing thanks to ever improving technology and an online community that helps one another more than any i’ve come across so far in my professional career.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4,5,6],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n\n