This week we welcome guest Blogger Andrew Dean, our newest Full Stack Developer here at Digital Paint! Enjoy, share and discuss.

Mobile responsive website popularity has been growing for a while now and it’s clear to see why as nearly everyone you know will have a smartphone capable of browsing the web. With 80% of all consumers owning a smartphone, in 2016 mobile web usage actually overtook desktop for the first time and it’s expected to stay that way as mobile and tablets are only getting more popular.
If the consumer is viewing your website on a mobile device but the information isn’t clearly laid out, the unforgiving consumer will shy away to another website which can offer a more mobile friendly experience, which means you’ve lost a customer. Research also shows that 61% of people won’t return to your site if it’s not mobile responsive, meaning you’re limiting yourself to only people browsing the web with laptops/desktops, which was fine 3/5 years ago, but now phones can offer a more convenient way to search the web, so there’s really no hiding from the fact that if your site isn’t mobile responsive…it bloody needs to be!
For web developers, creating a mobile responsive website has never been easier, with several frameworks offering mobile responsiveness built into platforms such as Foundation and Bootstrap, or for people who don’t like to code there’s options like Wordpress and Drupal which

have

dozens of plugins to make building a mobile responsive website easy. Just be careful though, as we can all spot a templated Wordpress site or homemade Wix site a mile off, and this can have an adverse effect on your brand quality.
Something to consider though is that some companies still have two separate websites for mobile and desktop which effectively means paying an agency to build and maintain two websites, which is a giant waste of precious budgets. For your business, having a mobile responsive website eliminates the need for this tomfoolery, as it will scale your website for the device its being viewed on. Just ensure that the user experience on the different mobile devices is carefully considered and that any functional differences between devices are purposeful and not in error. For example, if you look at this website on mobile compared with desktop, there are certain features that have been removed. The humorous chat-boxes between staff members on desktop has been removed on mobile to ensure that the core overall web experience is not effected.
So make sure your website is mobile responsive, but beyond that, make sure your website is purposefully mobile responsive and that the user experience is considered throughout, otherwise it would be like Tesco opening one of their express stores but filling it with everything their big stores stock…can you imagine the mess and struggle you’d have finding everything you wanted?