Mobile Design In-Depth
Optimizing User Experience
Responsive design is more than just making images and text scale to size. Condensing all of your normal desktop content into a mobile format very rarely provides for a pleasant experience. Mobile users are on the go. They don't want all the bells and whistles. They want the information they came for along with simple, intuitive navigation. "Strictly" responsive sites are reportedly losing up to 2/3 of their conversions. You can read more about that in this article on responsive design pitfalls from SEO industry leader Moz.com.
Mobile-Friendly and SEO
In April of 2015, Google made a change to it's ranking algorithm that gave preference to mobile-friendly website on mobile searches. It had a few nicknames, but the best was "Mobilegeddon." In November of 2016, they began a program to use mobile-first ranking index on all platforms. The full implementation will take time, but Google has definitely made it very clear what they consider important.
Advanced Options
Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP for short, is a design scheme created by Google to drastically reduce load time and data usage of pages on mobile devices. Google gives extreme preference to AMP pages in mobile searches, but it is not yet rolled out for all industries. The first to get it was news and blog type searches. If your site classifies as such and doesn't deliver AMP content, you're already behind the curve. Fear not, we can help. For everyone else, trust us when we say, "you're next!" If you're building a new site, now is the time to integrate AMP. It is easier to do up front, and you'll be in a solid position once it gets rolled out to your industry.
