We are living in changing times, my friends. The most dramatic change in the web in recent years has been the impact of smart phones and tablets. The mobile web is simply too large to ignore. It’s often cited that mobile web usage will overtake desktop usage as soon as 2014. It is for this reasons that you should be gearing up for the mobile web now. There are several different trains of thought on how you should handle this:

• Don’t do anything, the browsers are so good on smartphones they can read normal web sites
• Create apps (one for each mobile platform Apple, Blackberry, Android, Windows)
• Creative a responsive web site

Many organizations want to be able to say they have their own app. Whilst we do build mobile applications, our recommendation to many of our clients is to make the web site responsive instead of building an app. This basically means that web site can interpret what type of device is looking at it, based on the size of the screen and can react accordingly. Simply put, it’s possible to make the web site re-organize itself based upon the orientation and screen size of the device looking at it – some elements are hidden, some are displayed and others are simplified depending on the device. The days of the web site looking the same on all devices are over.

Of course, if you really feel that a dedicated app is key to your company’s digital offering we can build it for you. But our suggestion is to carefully plan what goes into this app. Is it a brochure app, targeting prospective customers? Or is it a functional app that draws in the company’s news and events and has editable content? Perhaps a mixture of the two? Do you focus on iOS and Android only or also include Windows & Blackberry?

Creating a responsive web site does add to the design and development time to a web site project, which ultimately leads to more cost, but we firmly believe that you should adopt this approach to the design of your web site. In some respects it’s still a fairly new approach, but have no doubt: it is the future of web design and will deliver a better experience to your users. Furthermore, the cost is much less than creating a dedicated native app for each mobile platform.

Check out our work for some of our recent responsive designs.