Responsive web design should I bother? If it isn’t broke don’t fix it?
-
One of my new businesses is letting holiday cottages and on a few occasions expert web designers have suggested that I should have a redesign because my Dreamweaver website is looking dated and maybe not the best navigation system. The website started off a couple of years ago with one cottage owned by me and I designed the website and I’m certainly not the professional by any means. http://www.endeavourcottage.co.uk/
The only reason I have not invested in a redesign ( although I’m thinking of it once again seriously at the moment ) is because the website has developed into a small letting agency now with eight properties and it’s doing okay with reasonably good search engine listings achieving good occupancy rates on most of the properties. The feedback from people booking cottages is often complimentary regarding how they visualise the properties. I get the feeling this could be because the subject of this website is old world cottages in at old characterful fishing port and possibly the people booking holidays like the personal unpolished website approach, rather than the larger faceless but professionally designed agencies websites, if you get my meaning.
In the future of the company grows I can see how will have no choice but have professional template and navigation structure that maybe at this stage it’s just not worth doing?
I’ve attached a snapshot of my analytics which shows that when social media like Facebook traffic look at the website there is slightly more people are using mobiles and desktop computers but they seem to stay a similar period of time a look at a similar number of pages so there must be finding site navigation reasonable.
What do you think would you go for a redesign at this stage and if so what would be the major advantages?
-
Hi Alan,
One option you might not have considered is buying a pre-buiilt premium responsive theme, either as HTML/CSS templates, or a Wordpress theme, then customize the design to suit from there. Some of the big theme marketplaces like ThemeForest have premium themes focused on holiday rentals, so I can imagine you'll find something suitable. This should reduce your costs quite a lot, whilst still allowing you to keep up with the competition.
Let me know if you would like any further advice on this.
All the best, Greg -
The website is mainly just about reading text are looking at pictures there is a service using a data blocker for a provisional booking. I’ve never heard of dynamic serving so I’ll look into that.
-
I did notice that there was a comment asking somewhere else why the new design on Moz was not responsive, I’m surprised I wonder why this wasn’t used.
I recently started a social media campaign and notice an increase in the percentage of mobile users, in comparison to general Google search users which is slightly lower percentage. I must admit I’ve not checked in fine detail how user-friendly my website is on my android phone, it seemed quite easy to navigate between pages and even to book using a service called data blocker but I will do some research because I can see that even sleights increases in usability regarding mobile users would probably make the process of searching the properties and booking easier and more attractive.
Also check out the competition and see how their websites are performing on mobile.
I never use my mobile to search on the Internet personally set something up not deeply considered and I was just putting out the question to see what the people’s feelings were regarding the subject and make their own experience of responsive design from their websites.
-
Obviously Moz is in a different industry than cottage rentals, but one of the biggest things we heard about our redesign was that it was not responsive and did not render well on mobile devices. At least for our audience, they've come to expect that the site will be usable on something besides just their primary computer.
From the perspective of a small business owner though, I get you. I wouldn't imagine too many people are interested in ordering a USS Iowa hull from their phones, but I could be wrong. In your case, I would think it would depend on how far in advance people book your cottages. If there are some available with only a few days of notice, I would think having a site that works well for mobile would help when people are on a holiday and looking for their next place to stay.
-
50% sounds pretty significant. Responsive design is a great solution for news sites, blogs, and other sites with relatively simple user requirements. If users do more than just read content on your site, I'd recommend going with dynamic serving for a more tailored mobile experience.
-
Thanks for your detailed response and I understand.
The percentage of traffic using mobile at the moment’s seems to be almost 50% of the total traffic and they seem to stay slightly less time on the site. The site seems reasonably okay to navigate on my mobile but obviously I can see to compete with the competition I’ll have redesign at some point.
I wonder how many of our Moz members' websites have invested in a mobile version are a responsive design version of their business websites..
-
Creating a specific website for mobile users, whether by responsive design or dynamic serving is going to result in a better user experience than just serving the regular version of your site, even if it's just making the font bigger and the buttons a little easier to click on. As mobile adoption grows in usage, you will probably want to consider mobile design.
If you go into Google Analytics, and go to Audience -> Mobile -> Overview, it will show you the percentage of your traffic that is mobile, and their usage metrics. Based on those numbers, you can determine whether a mobile re-design is worth the resources at this time.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Reducing Amount of Text on Web Pages-Risk of Killing Ranking?
We are a commercial real estate brokerage firm in Manhattan. Our site (w w w . m e t r o - m a n h a t t a n . com) is text heavy and somewhat uninviting. Ranking is fair. Conversions awful. Our niche is very competitive. We plan on reducing the amount of text and making the site more visual. Among the planned changes: -Reduce amount of text in home page and text heavy pages. More emphasis on product (listings)
Branding | | Kingalan1
-Much larger photos for listings
-Lighter cleaner design with more open white areas
-Use of more visible fonts
-Better forms New design will be like: http://www.dernieretage-paris.com/ Theme and graphics based on Manhattan. More visuals. Better photos. Less text. But are we shooting ourselves in the foot by reducing text? Is there a risk that Google will reduce our ranking? Can we compensate for reduced text that is visible to visitors by completing meta tags more fully? Any thoughts??? Thanks,
Alan0 -
In the Google search results, the company name (with the drop down arrow) next to the result URL is incorrect. The company being displayed here is a company we acquired many years back. How do I adjust/fix this?
When I search any term for my organization, we are getting good results BUT the company name, next to the results URL is of an orgnization we acquired many years back and not the name of our company. The URL is correct page JUST the company name next to this URL is incorrect on the Google search results page. How do I go about changing so the company name next to the URL ?
Branding | | DigitalNTT0 -
Company's Official Facebook Page Doesn't Appear In SERP
Hi, Our official company's facebook page doesn't appear at all, in all serp. I'll elaborate all in details here below. We have an official Arabic Company Facebook page with more than 1.9k likes, the page itself is very active and constantly being updated by a person in charge of the Facebook page. We also have an official English Company Facebook page - runs and operated in the same method mentioned above. when I search for my company's BRANDNAME in google.com.sa - both official facebook pages (arabic + english) don't appear in the serp. I've went through all the way to end of the results pages - I couldn't find both pages anywhere. On the other hand, when I search for the brand name + facebook, like this: BRANDNAME Facebook I can find both Arabic and English facebook pages in the 1st page one right after the other. Anyone can help me out here? I'm desperate for solution. Thanks 😉
Branding | | JonsonSwartz0 -
YouTube won't let me disconnect a Google+ business page from my channel.
Hello! Here is a good one. My YouTube channel is connected to a Google+ page a created by accident. Since I named this accidental page as a business, when I go into advanced setting to disconnect it from YouTube, it says "This feature is not available for this account." Does anyone know a way around this? I don't want to have to rebuild my Google+ page on the new, accidental page. I have put quite a bit of time onto my current page and would like to get it hooked up to YouTube. Please help! Thank you!
Branding | | sarita3450 -
Sites we can submit web design news to...
Hey Mozzers - happy 2013 to one and all, I hope everyone had a great festive season! Now we're all back into the swing of things, we're in the process of getting our new website up and running. We're a web and graphic design agency, and I'm putting together checklists to ensure we get new projects some coverage where deserved. There will be a different checklist for the different disciplines - brand design, packaging, web design and so on. For many of these disciplines, there are multiple news sites that we can reach out to when we have relevant stories - Dieline for packaging, for example. But for web design, any searches I do either show up CSS Galleries / portfolios (which I already have on the checklist under another section) or web tutorial sites. I don't seem to be able to find decent, trustworthy sites that exclusively feature web news. I'm sure they exist and it's just a case of 'can't see for looking', but does anyone know of decent sites that carry news stories about new websites going live? Obviously we know not every new site will be newsworthy - and indeed we wouldn't try to submit every new site we have go live for that very reason - but it would be good to have a clutch of high authority, well visited sites to turn to when we do have something of note. Any help is much appreciated! Thanks Mozzers!
Branding | | themegroup0 -
Do you think my simple design website reflects my product better or worse?
Its been suggested my holiday cottage letting website maybe could do with a professional polish up and maybe restructure and navigation and if it would improve bookings I wouldn't hesitate. My only thought pattern is that this particular website is certainly not high-tech (this website was designed by me in Dreamweaver) I have a great guy working for me which is much better web design than me and technically more capable of producing a professional standard website, but with this new sideline I'm presently a small home-based company currently only letting eight old cottages. My thinking was keep the website simple, personal and homely for the moment. http://www.endeavourcottage.co.uk/ The website tends to be competing against large agencies which have often hundreds of properties on their books and you have to go through their filtering system to find the small number of properties that might be of interest. I can see that if I was selling large quantities of electrical equipment or something similar you just in a very polished well-designed website. The feedback I get from customers is that like the website and they like to know they can get hold of the person behind it. Which direction would you go? polished professional company styled WordPress website or simple design website with lots of pictures and descriptions. If I ever hit the big time and have hundreds of cottages I would have to join the design and more complicated navigation of the other agencies websites but whilst I’m small maybe not? Thanks for reading Alan
Branding | | whitbycottages0 -
Web Strategy Conundrum
I run a business that offers eco friendly screen printing. Let's call it ECO SHIRT SHOP. We offer a specialized type of printing thru the website, then contract to printers throughout the US to execute the printing. (They each have their own distinct print businesses that they operate as well.) As of now we only divulge that we have print facilities in places like chicago, seattle, etc. but do not display addresses as we do not want to confuse customers. By not displaying these addresses, I feel we are missing huge opportunities to be listed by services like Yelp, Google places, etc - consequentially losing highly convertible geography specific search traffic. Ques: The print shops are open to us displaying facility address info, even somehow saying that Print Shop X prints for the ECO SHIRT SHOP network. I want to be transparent with customers and get more localized traffic, but don't want to confuse operations or give away business. For all you strategy guru's out there, how would you handle this? I am at a cross roads, and how we move forward is hugely important for the future of our business. Thanks, as always for your thoughts on this.
Branding | | peteandmikey0 -
Mobile Web Apps
Our newspaper website has an extensive readership in the US, UK, Australia and UAE. Should we go for a mobile web app? Is that worth the investment considering the fact that you have to design different apps for different devices. Or does a mobile version of the website work fine? Also, are there any specific guidelines that you shoudl follow when designing web apps with regards to SEO? Also, if you could point out some good resources for getting web apps designed, that would be great! Thanks, Rishad.
Branding | | RishadShaikh590