Responsive Website Design

Smartphone Sales are expected to reach 1 Billion this year (2013)…  Tablet sales are expected to reach 100 million.  Even though internet explorer ships with all PC’s with a windows install Googe’s Chrome has surpassed it as the most common internet browser.  Milestones that we thought would be much further into the future will be reached in 2013

According to a Pew Research Center report released in December 2012, 81 percent of  U.S. adults own a cell phone, 45 percent own a smart phone, and 25 percent own a tablet PC. And they are increasingly using those devices instead of traditional computers. For example, Pew researchers found that 31 percent of current mobile phone owners who go online do so almost exclusively with their mobile devices. Morgan Stanley and other firms predict that more users will be accessing the Web via mobile devices than with desktop computers by 2014.

On our website alone the same number Chrome visits as Explorer visits in the past month.  Over the last year 23% of all visitors to MuskokaGraphics.com were mobile browsers.  These are the stats that have compelled us to update our website to a mobile friendly (Responsive Design) a bit sooner than originally planned.  The mobile bounce rate was fairly high determining that visitors to our site from mobile devices were a bit frustrated at the navigation difficulty.

For those that are unfamiliar with the term “Responsive Website Design” It’s simply a website that is responsive to its environment. It detects the type of device and size of screen and adjusts itself to make the experience the best it can be for that size browser and device.  Allowing it to push out different sized images to save you on mobile internet bandwidth use.

While we have been building responsive designs for clients for some time now, it’s been difficult to justify the time spent in re-launching our site with so many other clients waiting for their designs.  However as I was told is much like the shoemakers kids having the worst shoes.

To Demonstrate make the window for this website smaller by dragging it from the bottom right hand corner (note you cannot have the window maximized to the screen to do this) Or simply visit us on your Iphone, Blackberry or other smartphone/Tablet.

Previous to this it was common for companies to create more than one website and have the website detect what device was visiting it and re-direct it to the proper site for that device.  This posed a lot of extra work for designers and serious extra cost for companies web solutions.  Now with responsive designs one website services all devices…

Ensure that the next time you are re-devloping your website for your company that this new website will be designed responsively :0)

Mark Wigston – Owner, Muskoka Graphics Ltd.