June 11 2013

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Responsive Site Design and Mobile Website Options

We’ve completed our 2013 marketing resolution: TopSpot.com is now a responsive site.

TopSpot_4Devices

What Is a Responsive Site?

A responsive site is one that resizes based on the screen size that is accessing the site. It allows for a seamless user experience across multiple screens without creating multiple sites. This is important: in a Google research study, they discovered that 90% of people move between devices to accomplish a goal, whether it’s on smartphones, PCs, tablets or TV. Businesses need to adapt their web presence for a user-friendly experience on smaller screens. EDIT: as we published this post, Google wrote in their webmaster blog that in the near future, sites with mobile experience issues won’t rank as highly in Google’s mobile search results.

What Does a Responsive Site Look Like?

Through mobile web development magic (actually CSS media queries, flexible templates, and some JavaScript events), our site now looks like this full-size:

Responsive Full Screen Design

Like this on a smaller screen:

Responsive on Tablet

And like this on a smartphone:

TopSpot_iPhone

Beyond Responsive Web Design

It doesn’t end with responsive web design. TopSpot also implements multi-screen marketing strategies tailored to our clients’ business goals. Multi-screen pay-per-click ads can be written and targeted for specific devices. We employ analytics to measure and report on the variety of devices accessing a site, their trends and their conversion paths.

Other Mobile Website Options

For many, responsive sites are not always the ideal option for one’s mobile website development. Google recommends using the most appropriate approach for your website, and Google supports having websites serve equivalent content using different URLs (such as www.example.com and m.example.com). An optimized website providing users a mobile experience that displays a scaled-down version of a site with easy calls to action and key information may be the best mobile strategy for a particular business audience. Many of our clients use m. “m dot” mobile sites to present their most vital content quickly and have seen success with this approach.

We highly encourage our clients to incorporate a mobile-friendly user experience into your integrated internet marketing strategy. If you would like more information on how to do this for your site, please contact us!