Why are we making the website responsive?

Felicity Wild
Thursday 21 April 2016

What is a responsive website?

A responsive website is a flexible one that works across all platforms, screen sizes and orientations, and responds to the user’s behaviour (e.g. screen tilting).

Fluid, proportion-based grids are used with flexible images, thus providing optimal user experience across all devices. Josh Clark’s Content is like water illustration is useful to explain this concept.

Content-is-like-water-1980

The University’s new homepage is responsive.

screenshot-www.st-andrews.ac.uk 2016-04-05 13-58-42

screenshot-www.st-andrews.ac.uk 2016-04-05 14-08-08

As opposed to the Current staff page, which is not.

screenshot-www.st-andrews.ac.uk 2016-04-05 14-10-49

screenshot-www.st-andrews.ac.uk 2016-04-05 14-11-11

Why is responsive important?

The following facts speak for themselves.

Strength in numbers

More than a billion people worldwide now own or have access to at least one smartphone and one-quarter of all global web searches are conducted on mobile or tablet devices. The University’s website traffic reflects this global trend, with 29% of all visits in 2015 being made from a mobile device.

Improved user experience

Research has shown that 57% of mobile users will abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.

If your website is not mobile-friendly you will have an extremely high bounce rate for mobile users (bounce rate is the percentage of people who leave your page within a second of visiting).

Search ranking penalties

Google now penalise non-responsive websites, depreciating their search ranking.

How do you know if your site meets their mobile-friendliness criteria? They’ve created a website that will tell you.

Still not convinced?

Just try navigating the Current staff page on your mobile.

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