Mobile is Dead. Think responsive website design. Actually it’s not really dead, but you should forget about doing a mobile site. Instead, adjust your mindset to responsive website design. Here’s why. When smartphones first hit the scene no one thought they would be used for web browsing on anything other than an emergency basis. Wrong. Check out recent mobile usage stats in this infographic. At least with regard to our website mobile counts for 26.4% of our total traffic and some of our clients have mobile traffic statistics that reach into the mid 30% range. This sizable and growing share of the market expects their needs to be addressed…imagine that. Originally Mobile meant developing a second website dedicated to mobile devices to which anyone browsing from a smartphone would be diverted. This approach meant twice the effort to keep content synchronized between the two sites and make sure both were working properly. The second stage in mobile came with companies like DudaMobile that could generate a dedicated mobile website from a company’s primary web presence. DudaMobile can read a website and recreate it in a mobile implementation. This approach, while certainly an improvement, has fallen by the wayside, giving rise to the “responsive” website. Responsive website design means that you have one website and it adapts to the user’s platform whether it’s a smartphone, tablet or laptop. What responsive does not mean is that smartphone users see a teeny-tiny version of your standard website. Simply being able to view a website on a smartphone does not make it a responsive site.
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A responsive site reformats itself to optimize the experience for end users based on their device. For example, here’s a side-by-side comparison of our site with responsive off and then with responsive on as seen on an iPhone. The differences might be subtle, but the outcome is not. By pursuing a responsive site design you and your organization are telling mobile users that you actually care about their experience and want them to value your site and thereby your company.