Industry Insights

We first started talking about responsive web design almost four years ago.

For those not familiar with the term, a responsive website is a website that automatically adapts to the device it’s being viewed on. It allows us as web designers to automatically change the layout of a website to ensure it looks great on desktop screens, tablets, phones and even watches pretty soon. This technique has become the de facto standard for building websites, and is certainly how we build all new sites.

But what about non-responsive websites? Are they hurting your business? Should you be redesigning them as soon as you can? Well, to date our advice has been no. Sure, it’s great to have a responsive site, especially when you consider the massive increase in mobile usage, but it hasn’t been the end of the world if you didn’t. However, that time is coming to an end.

Google announced recently that they are going to start considering how mobile-friendly a website is when ranking search results. They have gone as far as to say it will have a “significant impact” on search results. We’ve already been getting notices from Google Webmaster Tools informing us of client websites that are not mobile friendly (responsive). This is no small matter. Businesses rely heavily on these rankings and something like this could be quite harmful.

The new ranking algorithm will go into effect on April 21st. So, if you’ve been thinking it’s time for a redesign, you’re right now more than ever. Please give us a call to discuss this further.