Websites should be treated with the same care and attention as any physical premises occupied by a business. If they are left alone they will stagnate and fall into disrepair, looking shabby when seen alongside sites offered by rival firms.
This is not just a matter of improving the aesthetic impact of a site, but also of ensuring that sales do not take a hit.
A new report from the Centre for Retail Research found that businesses in the UK could be missing out on up to £6.6 billion in sales each year as a result of stubbornly refusing to adapt to the mobile-oriented browsing habits that are emerging at the moment.
Because of this, agencies like Big Media House, which offers web design in Milton Keynes, can assist even small businesses to make their sites mobile friendly and functionally flexible.
Mobile optimisation is not a new idea in web design, but it is still something that even the biggest organisations in the world are struggling to get to grips with, as evidenced by AOL’s recent responsive update for its own site.
Poaching Portable Audiences
The businesses which have already migrated to a mobile friendly approach to web design using responsive underpinnings make no bones about why they have done so: they want to grow the number of visitors who arrive on their site from portable devices. And implicit in this desire is the poaching of potential customers from rival organisations which are not as well prepared for the mobile takeover.
Even with short term considerations to take into account, such as the cost of enacting a mobile friendly makeover on a site that was previously aimed squarely at desktop visitors, the design needs to be looked at with long term benefits in mind.
Responsive design also helps to improve site traffic because it reduces fragmentation, consolidating an audience on to a single site rather than dividing it between two separate sites, one aimed at desktop and the other at mobile.
Exceeding Expectations
The matter of mobile migration is not only being debated because search engines like Google are making proper optimisation an important ranking signal. This is something behind which user habits are the driving force.
Because of this, even if a site does manage to avoid being penalised too severely in the search results, it may fall foul of visitors in an instant if it has not been updated to offer a fluid, fast browsing experience on mobile platforms.
This means that mobile optimisation is not just about having a responsive interface that resizes to fit whatever type of display is being used to view it, but also making sure that the embedded elements, content and copy are created and curated to target mobile users.
Sky high expectations and a web-savvy user base can be expected by businesses of all kinds today, so the central significance of responsive site design cannot be over-exaggerated.
