Now you may have heard this one already, but you need to make sure your website is responsive. But is that necessarily true? Well, sort of.
Yesterday I was talking about being responsive as a business. And that got me thinking. You see, I love technology. And I also have done quite a bit of work on website design over the years. In fact, I taught myself everything I know. I’ve been working with websites and online presence since working in a call centre back in 1996 when the Internet was really in its infancy.
Either way, I love what Social Media and the Internet are doing for the world of Customer Experience. There’s practically nowhere for us to hide from our customers online nowadays. And I would argue that’s a good thing. After all, without your customers, you HAVE no business to run or work in.
So I’m coming at this from a customer experience angle and thought it was worth sharing a few points.
1 – Demand.
With the number of mobile users surpassing the number of desktop users in 2014 (ComScore), there is no doubt how important delivering a mobile device-friendly experience is today.
2 – Requirements.
There are tons of different mobile devices on the market, including Smartphones and Tablet PCs and the latest generations of touchscreen hybrid laptops. Each has its own dimentions, screen size and resolution. Most but not all are touchscreen. Now, the thing is, you want the experience you deliver online to ‘work’ on the device the person is using.
3 – Urgency.
If you haven’t done this already, you’re a bit late. You see, Google keeps changing its search engine algorithm. They want more relevant content to be delivered to you. In April 2015 their update was designed specifically to boost the rankings of mobile-friendly pages. Their definition is: “pages that are legible and usable on mobile devices.”
4 – Solutions.
Most people choose one of these two options. Option a) involves making your site ‘responsive. This entails making changes to your website theme or web page code primarily. That enables the web pages and the content to adjust to the size and resolution of the screen being used. Option b) involves building separate web pages or a website specifically for use by people using mobile devices. I wager there is a third option. Option c) you build an app instead of or in addition to your website.
5 – Next Steps.
If you didn’t already do something about this the first step is to check whether your site is already responsive. If it’s not, I’d get on the phone to your website guy or girl and have a chat. You will need to think about what you want the experience to be you deliver to your Mobile users. That can take a while to work through.
Depending on whether your site runs on a content management system, (such as Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, etc.) you may well want to think about investing in a mobile-responsive theme for your website. This is especially true if you’re going through a redesign of any kind. As a side note, your website should really get an overhaul every couple of years anyway. Bit like a car. You wouldn’t keep driving the car without servicing it and changing the oil from time to time would you. (Although changing your website theme is a bit like respraying the car!)
So there you have it. Short and sweet for today. The key message is this: think about your mobile Internet visitors. Ensure you ‘design’ their experience so they can find what they are looking for without having to squint and pinch to zoom.
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