And Oh! the phones you can purchase …

Photo by Aditya Chinchure on Unsplash

I have a friend who owns a successful cleaning business. Although she lives in Parksville she remotely manages a team of cleaners in West Vancouver and the Sea to Sky corridor. She's also active on social media, and likes to chat about the latest offerings from Netflix and other content platforms. So imagine my surprise when I learned that she does not own a computer. She does everything, including manage her business, with her phone. And she's not alone.

The statistics website, Statista, tells us that 29.8 million Canadians access the internet with their phones. And the most used apps? Internet browsers. In fact, there are 91.86 mobile users per every 100 Canadians. And almost 36% of all Canadian activities online are done with a mobile phone. This figure has doubled in five years. 

And oh the phones you can purchase these days!

Have you seen the latest phone, which folds out to work as a tablet as well as a phone? But these phones are pricey. Because of budget constraints, many people own only one device, and that device is a phone. And many, like my friend, ask with genuine curiosity, "Why do I need anything else?"

Web designers take note.

What this tells us, as web designers, is that one of our most important jobs is to be sure a client's website looks just as fabulous on mobile as it does on a laptop or desktop computer. And we also need to be sure the website operates properly - that people can easily find the information they are looking for and easily navigate through the website's offerings.

Here at Goodwin Creative we build websites with the Squarespace platform which automatically optimizes a new designs for mobile. However, we still need to roll up our sleeves and dig into the code a bit to be sure all the bits and pieces are showing properly. And because the internet is in a constant state of upgrades and improvements, sometimes we'll need to dig back in every few years just to keep the mobile version of a website looking its best.

Different strokes

Because a web page showing on a monitor is horizontal, or ‘landscape’ and a web page showing on a phone is vertical, or ‘portrait.’ web design for each is quite different. As well, people have different expectations of a website on their phone than they do on their computers. When a person accesses a website on their phone, they don’t want to scroll side-to-side. They want to scroll lengthwise. And mobile users don’t like menus - at least, not the navigation style with drop-downs. Our thumbs are too thick for drop-downs!

As a result, mobile websites typically have long home pages with all the important, and google-rich, information readily at hand. And they have a ‘hamburger’ menu which, when touched, presents a completely new screen to display the menu.

A good web designer needs to consider all these factors when planning a website in 2021.

But what about websites that are older than five years?

Five years ago, which seems a short time in human terms but is much longer in internet time, optimizing a website for the internet was a much bigger job. And not all clients wanted to invest in the process. It was actually an option! Over the past half decade we have been offering an upgrade for some of those old sites, which makes the menus collapse into web hamburgers and the graphic elements stack. But this is not a good option anymore.

Today we encourage all our clients to upgrade.

We can build you a lovely website that will be just as lovely on your client's phone. Or your mother's ipad. Or your grandfather's desktop.

We’ll connect with you right away to talk about your shiny new mobile-responsive company website.