n light of desktop web traffic nearing an all-time low, please discuss what the decline of the desktop could mean for your business’s website. Highlight the importance of creating a responsive web design that will work on the mobile web and how to cater your website and content towards mobile users.
PC sales have been in decline for nearly three years now, and with that have followed a considerable increase in desktop traffic for websites. Unsurprisingly, this largely due to the proliferation of devices like smartphones, tablets, and other alternative means to access the Internet. Where the home computer was at one time nearly the only way in which people would check their email, browse the net, and consume streaming media, times are rapidly changing. As a business owner, this means that more and more and more people are going to your website through non-traditional browsers.
New Platforms for Connectivity
It’s been long understood that people are unforgiving when it comes to second rate browsing experiences. Study after study has demonstrated that both slow load times and ineffective presentations will lead people will abandon a website after only four or five seconds. If your site doesn’t “just work”, and work almost immediately, it’s going to cost you traffic. Combined with the fact that people have begun to abandon more traditional browsing through home computers in favor of the mobile platform, this means it’s almost a necessity for businesses to adapt to these new circumstances.
Your email marketing campaign needs to be ready to have your emails load flawlessly on thousands of different types of devices. Your website needs to be ready to look as great as it does on obscure mobile devices as it does on a 1080p high definition monitor. Last but not least, all of your content needs to be accessible and useful regardless of where or when someone is trying to use it.
Responsive Design as a Solution
In the recent past, many developers would solve this problem by launching an entirely separate mobile domain. Unfortunately, that solution invented as many new problems as it solved. IT meant starting over from scratch in your SEO. It also meant creating two sets of content, one for each site.
Fortunately, you won’t need to design entirely new websites to solve this problem anymore. This where responsive design sites come in, a type of website that changes its appearance to adapt to the device that it’s loading on. Whether someone loads a responsive design site on their phone, tablet, or PC, a responsive design site will automatically adjust its images and content to appear flawlessly on the accessing device.
Responsive design has also helped improve two of the most important concerns that have haunted web developers for the better part of the past two decades: performance and speed. While the earliest efforts to adapt to the mobile platform focused on methods to load the sites quickly because of the relatively low connection speed on those networks, responsive design has fixed the issue by forcing designers to pay attention to the size of files and the data plans of their visitors. The end result is a website that looks flawless no matter where it’s loaded but won’t tank someone’s data plan because it isn’t attempting to load graphics designed for a PC onto a mobile platform.
The future is mobile. There are billions of smartphone users out there, and Statista has estimated that 5 billion people will be mobile by 2017. Look at your own website’s analytics and see how many people visit your site on mobile, and you can find out just how many people you’re potentially frustrating, and how many of those mobile users click away from your site when they’re given a second-rate experience.
Make sure your website is prepared for the future on internet usage and Google’s ‘Mobilegeddon’ with help from the inbound marketing experts at Clear Sky SEO. Our team has years of experience revamping websites and helping them survive any patterns and trends in the industry, providing you with a comprehensive SEO marketing strategy to keep you ahead of the competition and in front of your target audience. Don’t let the latest technology trends leave your website in the dust, stay ahead of the game with help from the comprehensive marketing strategies from The Guerrilla Agency.
