You’ve probably heard of responsive web design, but why does it matter? Imagine sitting on the subway, fighting off boredom. Naturally you grab your smart phone and start browsing the Internet. You’re thinking, “This is a great time for me to learn how to give my pet giraffe a makeover,” so you Google “pet-friendly giraffe toenail polish.” Luckily for you there are a ton of sites to help guide you in your quest for giraffe beautification.
The first site you click on immediately redirects you to a mobile–friendly site, but the loading process takes so long, that you lose interest and click away. Why waste your precious mobile data on a site that takes 30 seconds to load?. Nope. Next.
The second site looks promising. The home page loads quickly, but you have to zoom in and out just to read text and navigate. The buttons are so small that you keep accidentally tapping the wrong thing. This process continues until you’re so frustrated you give up. Besides, your stop is up next. You leave the subway feeling irritated.
If any of those sites had been optimized and responsive, the outcome could have been much different. The website’s content, buttons, layout, and images would be optimized for mobile viewing, loaded quickly, and the user would have gotten what they needed quickly and efficiently.
But who cares? Can’t they just wait and search on a desktop computer? A few years ago that may have been a reasonable expectation, but statistics are showing that mobile users are quickly becoming the majority for web searches. Don’t you want to capture the fastest growing web browsing audience out there? Take a look at this nifty infographic from 2013 (http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/infographic-2013-mobile-growth-statistics/). It clearly shows where the trends are heading.
So what’s the point? The point is if you have a website that hasn’t been updated since 2010 (technology changes fast…doesn’t it?), it’s time to make the leap and update. If you want to keep up with the competition, you need to go responsive. NOW.
So don’t wait. Capture an entirely new audience by optimizing your website and making it responsive today. And to “toot-toot” our own horn, WMS totally can help.
Thanks for reading!
