Mobile-friendly Website Design: Is It Really Important?

When you are designing a website, either on your own or with the help of a website design company, the question of whether or not it is worth taking the type to include mobile-friendly responsive design in your site.

While your designer may think that it is a no-brainer, it is completely understandable that a paying customer wants to make sure that they are not paying for “extra” features that really just end up costing more money without much benefit. Is that the case with a mobile-friendly design, though? We go into detail below.

If you are designing a site, responsive design is something that you are going to need to consider, and we suggest that you take it seriously. With over 50% of all web traffic taking place on smartphones, deciding to save on costs and leave out this type of design is only going to cost you money.

We could end the article right here, but take a look below to get a better idea of why you ABSOLUTELY need to focus on mobile design while you are building a new website, or revamping your existing site.

What Is Mobile-optimized Design, and Why Does It Matter?

The mobile-specific design falls under the umbrella of “responsive design” when it comes to web design, and all this means is that your website has the capability to scale up and down based on the size of the screen it is being viewed from.

Think about your site as it appears on your laptop or desktop computer, with an 11” or larger screen. Now think about how your site would look if you left it as-is and crammed it down into your smartphone. Menus would overlap, pictures would cover text, and clicking links would be a disaster. There has to be a better way!

An Essential Design Principle

Responsive design has been an absolutely essential design principle for a long time, but before the advent of smartphones and tablets, it was typically done with respect to the web browser (Safari, Internet Explorer, Chrome). Nowadays, the responsive design must take into account the many different web browsers, as well as the many different aspect ratios of screens, including thousands of different models of smartphones, tablets, and more. 

Responsive design not only scales your website to the size of the screen, but it also makes additional design decisions that will collapse menus, reduce the size of images, create mobile-friendly transaction pages, and provide visitors with font sizes that make sense to work with on a smaller screen.

How To Incorporate Mobile Design Into Your Website

As you can imagine, responsive design requires some technical know-how to ensure that it works seamlessly. Web designers spend a significant amount of their time making sure that each design element on your desktop website either makes it into the mobile site or that the same outcomes are possible even if the exact same elements do not transfer. 

There are many plug-and-play web design platforms that you can choose to use that make it easy to build your own site, and that automatically creates a mobile version of your site but be aware of the drawbacks of these options.

When you use a user-friendly site maker, you are missing out on the expertise of a web design company or an expert that can help you with every piece of what goes into a successful site, and not just launching something that looks nice but doesn’t convert. 

Hire a designer, and get the results that you rightfully expect for your website.