WHY MOBILE FIRST DESIGN IS ESSENTIAL?
WHAT DOES THAT ‘MOBILE-FIRST’ DESIGN IN SEO REALLY MEAN?
Take an old school website and run it on your PC. Access various features of it. Now take your smartphone and try to do the same. Have you noticed that there are some missing features in your smartphone? You just accessed them on your PC, but can’t do the same with your smartphone? Forget features. Did you notice the shape, ratio, etc. of the images on your screen? Are they proportional? Is it a responsive web design? These drawbacks really spoil the user experience one can get from that particular website.
The question now is, “Why are we just building mere responsive web designs that can only cater to the audience who run it on PCs and Laptops?” The users are evolving, so does their internet usage strategy and it is up to us to do the same. We may not able to outrun them, but we can surely run along with them. One such way is the ‘Mobile-first’ principle.
Mobile-first, this progressive advancement, is not only the future but also the present.
This one may sound harsh, but it is the reality. There are phones now having a RAM capacity incredibly larger than the PCs and Laptops we have with us. There are ‘n’ number of features being updated every day and the numerous patches you install on your phone every month is already enhancing the way you handle your phones. A website that is friendly with those phones is the future and that is the race every business owner has to participate. The only question your potential customer would ask you is, are you in?
Even the tech giants like Google did not notice this strategy until 2010. It is the simple approach of designing your website for mobile users first and then adapting the same for the other device users. In the past, the mobile designs of websites are an afterthought. But this challenging ‘mobile-first’ strategy demands a new approach when it comes to planning, UX design, and implementation. This adaptation has indeed created a paradigm shift, making even the smart work of tweaking a desktop site to look compatible on a smartphone has been clearly outdated. Let it be videos, audios, images, maps, interactive contents, etc…
Everything should be accessible and they should adjust themselves every time based on the devices of the users.
Change in strategy: Mobile Friendly vs. Responsive Design vs. Mobile First Design
There is a stockpile of differences between a desktop and a mobile phone. One can think as if it is just the placement of things. Actually, it goes way beyond that. For example, a traditional, yet interactive website has only been designed for the users who are having a keyboard and mouse. Such interactions cannot be traced to mobile users. Their way of interacting with the screens is completely different and a newly built website should understand this properly.
Every time when the ‘Mobile-friendly’ word is uttered, people should prefix it with ‘Almost’. Because that is the way, it is! The website and the functionalities can adapt to suit both the desktop and mobile devices. However, clearly, some features we had seen in the desktop may completely change or be gone without a trace. While a mobile-friendly website only aims to meet the majority of the mobile user’s needs, it can never be a complete product. In short, it cannot be the original.
A ‘Responsive Web Design’ is an evolved form of ‘Mobile-friendly’ and one can notice that pages are designed for various screen sizes and orientations and the content contained in them looks pleasant and fully functional in all aspects. The ‘Mobile-friendly’ is clearly an afterthought, while this ‘responsive’ way of approach is an add-on to an existing website, which has been thought as the one built for desktops and laptops.
The ‘mobile-first’ design in SEO strategy asks the designer to design for the smallest screen first, unlike the old days where the ‘large screen first’ policy has been followed. Nowadays, the developers can order the websites to adjust, optimize their page layouts for particular devices, credits to HTML5, CS3 and support responsive JAVA support calls. It also encourages the designers to keep the content minimal and focused, thus also enhancing the experience of the users who are visiting the site with a cause.
Stats indicate that since 2014, the usage of the desktop was declined from 19.1% to 10.6%.
Google confirmed that the internet usage strategy that is, the mobile search data has already surpassed the desktop search data by the year 2015.
Wroblewski wrote that there are 1.45 million devices being brought to life, compared to 3,17,124 human births.
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