For a couple of years now I've been extolling the virtues of responsive website design - Google has now backed this approach

A few years ago I started to realise that the time was right to start researching systems to aid responsive website design. Am I glad I did! During my travels across the internet I became aware of Foundation by Zurb, a collection of stylesheet wonderfulness and Javascript beauty that struck me as being a perfect fit with my preferred Content Management System.

I explain what a responsive website is in this earlier blog post - take a look and it will give you some idea what it's all about. A very straightforward way of putting it would be that we present the same content to handheld devices (such as smartphones) as we present to desktop computers, the only difference being that the site 'shuffles' to display well on any particular device. i.e. it responds to the device being used to view it.

The Good News About Responsive Websites

If I've produced your website in the last couple of years the good news is that it will probably already be responsive. Every new site I build uses the latest responsive framework. I'm currently redeveloping a couple of older sites to also be responsive, after I started to get direct communication from Google saying that the 'mobile-friendliness' of a website would become an important ranking factor as of April 2015.

The following is an extract from that direct communication with google...

"Google systems have tested 133 pages from your site and found that 100% of them have critical mobile usability errors. The errors on these 133 pages severely affect how mobile users are able to experience your website. These pages will not be seen as mobile-friendly by Google Search, and will therefore be displayed and ranked appropriately for smartphone users."

Typical example of Google communication regarding mobile usability on a non-responsive website

Read more about Google and mobile usability here...

I'm committed to using the latest technology and staying in front of the competition when it comes to making informed decisions about website design and development. It's not always easy to predict the future in such a volatile business environment but I'm pleased to say that the early research I carried out has certainly benefited my clients.

I'm Chris Fickling, I'm a website developer but more importantly I have a great deal of experience in working with many businesses to improve their visibility, both on and off-line. I can provide a free, no obligation assessment of your website and an outline plan of how you can improve its performance and visibility. Just get in touch - I look forward to hearing from you.

Chris Fickling