Is your website mobile friendly?

[sabian1982]

Spear headed from the rather interesting topic of Mobile Friendly - What's Changed? the volume of mobile traffic is only set to get higher as consumers look to engage with businesses and services whilst on the move. The question is, are you and your business geared up for this increase in mobile devices?

 

[Marcus Allen]

It's essential even if your rank didn't change because it affects user experience. It would have people returning to search immediately increasing bounce rate and that could eventually affect a businesses rank

 

[Cromulent]

Mobile really is the future of the web whether you like it or not. More and more people are using their mobile devices (phone, phablet, tablet) to access the web and other internet services such as email.

So if you want an online presence then making sure you are mobile friendly in some way is important. Of course some companies may decide that a native mobile app might be best and just leave the website for desktop and laptop users. I'm still undecided on whether this is a good idea or not.

Obviously the best option is have a mobile friendly website AND native mobile applications for at least Android and iOS. Windows Phone might also be an option as well.

I'm certainly working on all three things for my current project and the plan is to have a mobile friendly website and Android and iOS clients as well just to make sure that we have the best solution possible no matter how people want to use our service.

 

[Norman Bailey]

The market forces us all to make our websites mobile friendly and Google are now going to penalise us if they are not by downgrading our status.

We went WAP friendly at one time because that was going to be the next best thing - what a waste of time and effort that was!

 

[ryedale]

To be fair, it's a bit different now!

Responsive sites that are done properly and actually thought out in terms of the user experience are well worth the investment

 

[Rob Gordon]

"Smartphones overtake laptops as UK internet users’ number one device"
from media.ofcom.org.uk / news / 2015 / cmr-uk-2015 /
(sorry can't post links yet)

 

[Vincentas]

Yes, I'm running a website that is now fully mobile friendly, but we've decided to do a sister project and for this ones website we are going to do only three main and most usable sizes which will save up lots of our time. I hope that will work. What do you guys think?

 

[fisicx]

...we are going to do only three main and most usable sizes...

That's not a sensible approach. Technology changes all the time so do screen resolutions. It's not difficult to build a fully responsive layout. Start with the smallest screen size and increase until you get ot a desktop. I've discovered you can build a site that smoothly transitions from 320px to 1200px with just a few lines of CSS. The trick is to get the initial stucture correct.

 

[Martin Gallagher]

Recently re-developed my personal site, fully mobile/responsive design - be interesting to see if there's any tangible ranking benefits, I changed a lot though so it'll be hard to measure the true SEO benefit - but it is of course extremely important for UX.

 

[fisicx]

Why are you hiding the navigation? There have been a lot of UX studies on small screen navigation and the hamburger menu isn't good - you are making the visitor do all the work. And it's totally unnecessary on a large screen. So I'm just wondering what you rationale was for doing this?

PS: One page sites are pants for SEO...

 

[Martin Gallagher]

The hamburger menu / static nav is contentious, but I believe it's becoming ubiquitous.

Without using that paradigm you have few options; reduce screen real-estate by using a always-visible static menu on devices with little screen real estate to begin with. You could make the user navigate to the menu location (bad UX). Ultimately my motive was maximum real estate for the content in question - hiding the menu on desktop is somewhat pointless due to the amount of space available, but it's visual "noise".

UX > SEO. Multiple pages of minimal content for a personal site is yet more navigation for end users.

 

[fisicx]

Without using that paradigm you have few options; reduce screen real-estate by using a always-visible static menu on devices with little screen real estate to begin with.

Interesting...

When I put back the always visible menu on my sites I saw improved engagement. People are used to scrolling on small screens so leaving the menu at the top of a page isn't an issue. And clever use of CSS can change the who way the menu works on different screen resolutions.

 

[Martin Gallagher]

You could be correct; certainly something for me to consider AB testing!

 

[Rob Gordon]

I prefer the responsive option of a simple stacked menu beneath the header. Hamburger option is an obvious 'menu' cue for those of us online a lot, but many miss it.

 

[fisicx]

I've been testing this for a while on a range of sites and the hamburger menu tends to have fewer interactions and hence a drop in conversions. There are ways to build a good site using a hamburger menu but it's requires a lot of planning and clever responsive design.

 

[nevpro]

Yes, we are running our website that is now fully mobile friendly and user friendly

 

[MarcusCornelius]

The first thing I am doing when creating new site is adding separate mobile version of web pages. Unfortunately, you need to keep two copies as normal desktop-version layout would not likely to work on mobile devices. There are some frameworks that promise to make site mobile-friendly automatically but reality is that it does not work. So unfortunately, having two copies is inevitable.

The choice on server-side between desktop/mobile versions happens when user starts downloading main page (usually desktop version) that contains script analyzing screen dimensions. If the dimensions point out to mobile device then the page gets redirected to mobile version.

 

[ryedale]

Having two copies is not inevitable at all and completely unnecessary. Any site that hasn't been built with mobile in mind can be converted by switching the framework dimensions from pixels to percentages and using media queries in the css.

 

[fisicx]

Unfortunately, you need to keep two copies as normal desktop-version layout would not likely to work on mobile devices.

Complete rubbish. If you need two versions then your design is pants.

In any case adopting your approach would require at least three versions: mobile, tablet, desktop. And for the tablet you need to differentiate between landscape and portrait.

 

[MarcusCornelius]

If web-site design is simple then you can use frameworks that support "responsive design" concept and have a single copy of website files. However, if the web-site design is complex enough that it is better to have two versions separately: desktop/tablet (980px width) and mobile (320px width) because it would be necessary to adjust design of website specifically for mobile version. There is no need to have separate tablet version and definitely no need to support landscape/portrait orientations as web-site width is fixed.

You can take a look at Wix web-site designer for example - when you create web-site it automatically gives you both desktop and mobile versions that you can change independently.

 

[Himons]

Nowadays running a page that is mobile friendly is a must. As a regular consuments, how often you were forced by a situation to check the mobile number, or opening times of a shop you do not visit very often, when you were outdoor? Doing such a basic things on desktop version, downsized to mobile screen is usualy a torture. Many times when I was about to for ex. emergency visit a dentist, or call florist I resigned from the one which page I couldn't acces with my mobile.

 

[neilwhite483]

We have launched our updated website this week and hope it is mobile friendly. We have viewed it on mobile devices and are pleased with the results.

 

[Mingleflow]

However, if the web-site design is complex enough that it is better to have two versions separately:

I think that is the past you just mentioned here. Nowadays the style/design of the website should react to screen size

take a quick look at the related wikipedia page if you don't believe us

I haven't tried creating a website with Wix, but I doubt they send you two versions at the end rather than a responsive. They weren't that big if they would do that I believe. I can see they show both versions to you to get some idea and this is what every web designer (should) do: provide layout for mobile, tablet and PC at least (or more as fisicx mentioned) but then coding is different than provided pictures

 

[Mail Workshop]

Our is but it'd be nice to be able to decide exactly how our website looks on mobile rather than the theme template doing that automatically.

 

[Mingleflow]

how our website looks on mobile rather than the theme template doing that automatically.

Hi Mail Workshop,

I think you can amend your template (or have your designer/someone) to change the outcome for mobile view or you can go away from predefined templates and have a website which is built based on your requirements and taste with only customised elements and the preferred layout on PC, tablet, mobile or any other device

 

[MichelleMoo]

To be honest, I think if a design is that complex it potentially isn't user friendly. If you have two sites you are also creating a duplicate content issue.

My understanding (which could be wrong) is that you won't be penalised by Google if your site isn't mobile friendly, unless someone is searching on a mobile. I've seen this on some sites I work on, if I search on my mobile I get different search results to the search on my desktop.

 

[Karimbo]

i hate using most "mobile friendly" sites, they always seem to be missing key content from the desktop version and I always find myself seeking out the desktop site.

 

[123 IT Solutions]

i hate using most "mobile friendly" sites, they always seem to be missing key content from the desktop version and I always find myself seeking out the desktop site.

I've never understood the benefit of that either.... there is very little content that I can think of that cant display on a smaller screen so why remove it.

 

[fisicx]

And also very annoying is the hamburger menu - why hide the very thing you want people to click on.

And if you feel you really realy must use the hamburger menu don't rely on a script to make it work because al lthis does is sllloooowwww things down. And Google doesn't like slow. In fact it's now telling people not to use scripts to make your site work.

 

[gaganboparai]

Yes. Now this is one of the ranking factor of google. We can also check page has mobile friendly design or not by using google's mobile friendly test tool -> googgl.me /euhU9