The Shift to Responsive: Why We Are No Longer Building Desktop-only Websites

It’s no secret we are already living in a Post-PC era; with PC sales plummeting and tablet sales forecasted to reach over 100million this year responsive sites are no longer a fad or luxury, but a necessity. We started creating responsive websites early on, and with technology, frameworks and practices only getting better we’ve gotten quite damn good at it.

Play by the numbers

As of today, our website gets more than 30% of it’s traffic on mobile devices, and we find similar trends when researching into our client’s sites. It’s a no brainer that this number will only increase, we expect as much as 50% by next year. We have to paly by the numbers. Are you willing to sacrifice that 50% of potential customers by next year? Surely not.

Responsive is no longer an option in our proposals

There used to be a time when we included responsive work (design and dev) as an option in our proposals, but not anymore. There’s two reasons: first, 90% of our clients ask for a responsive website off the bat and second, you can’t afford to ignore post-pc era devices. We always go the extra mile to ensure our client’s ROI, and covering mobile/tablet users is vital for optimal conversion and signups.

We normally start our projects by doing competition & market research and the first thing that usually pops up is the lack of mobile/tablet support from the competing companies & websites. This is a huge step forward to getting ahead and staying relevant in the market, we always recommend not to ignore but embrace. The extra effort will be worth the investment from trackable ROI kpi’s.

How we do it

Early in the project planning stages, in between doing research and defining target customers/markets we establish a mobile strategy. From this strategy we create wireframes and designs, all part of the review and approval process. These final designs then get built as responsive states for website or web app.

Conclusion

Don’t ignore the post-pc era, rather embrace it. In almost every market chances are you might be loosing valuable conversions or customers if you’re not ready. If you have a chance to be ready for 100% of your visitors rather than 50% of them, what would you do?

Originally published at ideaware.co on November 21, 2013.