The number who view a small screen first (rather than TV or a monitor) is rising all the time, across all age brackets, as smart phones become ubiquitous and tablets fall in price, becoming more attractive devices in this age of mobility.
Your website must therefore be designed to suit a small screen using responsive web design or you will lose at least half of your potential audience, now and in the future.
In the late 1990s, WAP (Wireless Access Protocol) was introduced and this made it much simpler for data to be sent across a mobile network and then displayed on a mobile phone. However, today, nearly all phones and tablets fully support HTML, CSS and most JavaScript so that the average website can now be viewed on a mobile device. However, poor coding on the website can lead to restrictions on a small screen, which many users have faced and been frustrated by.
A responsive website can recognise the type of device that it is being viewed on, and the site and all of its elements are then displayed appropriately for that device. This means that images are smaller (and frequently compressed for mobile data connections), navigation is simpler, and text is resolved to fit within the smaller screen, rather than requiring constant scrolling to read all of the copy.
Check if your website is mobile-friendly today.
You may not know whether your website is responsive, so take a look at it on a mobile device or tablet. Better still, check it on multiple devices to ensure that it is working correctly for any visitor, no matter how they choose to visit your site. Contact us at WSI Digital Web about responsive web design for your site.