{"id":276204,"date":"2014-01-30T02:07:30","date_gmt":"2014-01-29T15:07:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/content.easyweddings.com\/au\/pro-education\/do-i-need-a-mobile-friendly-website\/"},"modified":"2014-01-30T02:07:30","modified_gmt":"2014-01-29T15:07:30","slug":"do-i-need-a-mobile-friendly-website","status":"publish","type":"au-pro-education","link":"https:\/\/www.easyweddings.com.au\/pro-education\/do-i-need-a-mobile-friendly-website\/","title":{"rendered":"Do I need a mobile-friendly website?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Do<\/p>\n

More and more people are accessing the internet\u00a0 – and, therefore\u00a0 your website – using smartphones and mobile devices.<\/p>\n

According to a recent study by Pew Internet, more than two-thirds of mobile phone owners in the US use their smartphones to access the Internet. That is a 100% increase over the past three years and it’s not a trend confined to the US.<\/p>\n

In fact, look around you and you’ll see plenty of people gazing down at their phone screens or tapping away at their iPads. It’s an increasingly common site and, as such, it’s no wonder that with more than one billion smartphones in use globally, mobile internet access is expected to overtake desktop access during 2014 and more than 50% of local searches are performed on smart phones.<\/p>\n

What all that boils down to is that your business website must<\/em> <\/strong>be mobile friendly to cater for the increasing number of potential clients visiting it via their smartphones or mobile devices.<\/p>\n

How do I get a mobile-friendly site?<\/strong><\/p>\n

You can either build a new mobile-friendly site or tweak your existing one.<\/p>\n

If you’re building a new website, be sure to ask for a responsive design.<\/p>\n

“This means that you won’t need to build a separate mobile-friendly website because your design will ‘respond’ to whatever device is accessing it by adjusting and displaying your content accordingly,” says Gal Opatovsky, Easy Weddings’ head website developer<\/a> who has built hundreds of websites during his 10-year web development career.<\/p>\n

“The advantage of having a responsive site is that you need only one site and one set of content, rather than two separate sites that you have to administer.”<\/p>\n

The image above illustrates how a responsive design will display your content in a way that is optimised for the device accessing it. This is accomplished with some clever coding, but we don’t really need to worry too much about the technicalities.<\/p>\n

All you need to know is that, for example, if your site is viewed on small device your content will flow in a linear fashion from top to bottom.<\/p>\n

This is a portrait orientation of your website and presents your content in one or maybe two columns.\u00a0 When your site is viewed on a larger desktop screen your content will adjust to fill the width of the screen. This represents a landscape orientation of your website.<\/p>\n

The main benefits of a responsive site are as follows:<\/p>\n