Something quite drastic happened to the computing world last year, yet it doesn’t seem to have been talked about as much as we feel it should of been – for the first time more smartphones (such as the iPhone) were shipped than traditional desktop computers! In other words that means that the little smartphone has now become more popular than the long-established personal computer.
That’s not the say that the traditional computer is dead, in fact shipments grew at around 15 percent (that’s around 414.6 million units.), compared to the previous year, however research group Canalys estimates that 487.7 million smartphones were shipped in 2011, which is an increase of over 60 percent from the 2010 shipping figures. Personally, here at SketchCode Studio, we don’t believe that smartphones are going to be replacing computers, but they are quickly becoming the mobile device of choice, compared to more traditional mobile phones.
So what does this mean to website design? Well, accessing the internet is a lot easier on a smartphone than on older types of mobile devices, so somewhat unsurprisingly the number of people visiting websites via their mobiles has increased at an incredible rate. Now if you already have a website then there’s no reason to panic as most smartphones have a way of shrinking an existing website to display on a smaller screen. However if you’ve been thinking about getting your website redesigned then it’s definitely worth considering a ‘Responsive Web Design’.
Responsive Web Design (RWD) essentially means that a web site is crafted to use CSS3 media queries to adapt the layout to the environment that it is being viewed in. As a result, mobile (smartphone/tablet) users will have a similar experience and see similar content to Desktop users — but the content will be laid out in such a way to ensure that the content is readable without having to zoom or do any kind of resizing.
Here at SketchCode Studio, we’ve already designed and built several responsive websites for our clients, including Meal4You and Dickies Workwear, so feel free to use our simple contact form, or why not give us a call on 01823 765171, to discuss how we can go about making you a website that’s prepared for the mobile revolution.
With the well-documented trend of smartphone growth, you’ll be glad that you did!
Responsive websites are extremely important nowadays that most people have smart phones and are highly dependent on these mobile devices. But the other thing that we need to consider aside from the fact that people mostly browse using their phones nowadays is that these people who do don’t really have the patience to tweak something if it doesn’t work for them. So if your website is going to be unreadable on their mobile devices after a few attempts to make it readable if it remains incomprehensible, they are going to leave your site and will more than likely not return.