planners — the-blog — Building Industry Marketing and Branding, VW Rentals with Wander Maine

Google announced a couple of months ago that mobile search surpassed desktop search for the first time! We all know that our mobile devices are being used more and more, and now Google is ranking and promoting sites as "mobile friendly." This means that at the very least you need to have a website that is viewed as mobile friendly by Google and that at best you should have a site that employs "responsive design." According to Signal Fire, "Mobile friendly refers to a site that displays accurately between your desktop/laptop computer and a mobile device...While it will appear smaller on a phone and may not work perfectly on a touchscreen tablet, a mobile friendly website will be perfectly functional." Responsive design is very similar in that it means that when the site is viewed on different types of devices (think tablets, phone, different size desktop monitors) that it will appear tailored to that specific device's size.

The difference between mobile friendly and responsive is that mobile friendly is designed for specific sizes of devices, whereas responsive designs are created with the intent that they will automatically adjust to any screen size, making them more easily adapted to future technologies. As you can imagine, it takes a lot more work to create a mobile friendly and responsive website, but Google ranks them significantly higher than websites that are not designed responsively.

Need more convincing? The US average for mobile usage is 2 hours and 42 minutes per day! That equates to 41 days each year! This trend is only going to grow, so make sure your web presence is inline with the current reality.

Wondering if your wedding website is mobile friendly? Google has made a tool for us all: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/

You can also Google your business name on your mobile device and you should see the "Mobile Friendly", see image below. Responsive design takes mobile friendly to the next level and allows for your website to be designed page by page for each specific device. The design for each takes into account the functionality of each specific platform. You can see below how the smaller versions of the site function differently on the homepage. Take particular notice of the mobile phone version, where users are able to email, get directions or phone directly from the homepage. This is super helpful for wedding guests that are traveling to a venue and just need to find out how to get there!

Desktop Version

iPad Version

iPhone Version

Tide Creative has been building mobile friendly and responsive websites(depending on your budget :) ) and would love to help yo update yours! Reach out here to schedule a consultation.