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
-
Rebranding & Responsive design. What first? Or do both at the same time?
We are planning a rebranding in January 2017. For us this means: redirects from root domain A.com to B.com on all our pages. Besides that we are planning to restyle our website to a responsive design in the beginning of November 2016. Now we a desktop website and a separate mobile website. So from our mobile website every URL will be redirected to a non-mobile variant. Both strategies will have impact on SEO, but should be positive on the long term. Now, what would YOU do: start with responsive design in November and do a new 'redirect session' after 2 months for the rebranding? Or do both at the same time?
Branding | | Maxaro.nl0 -
Consolidate to one robust web property?
I am new at my company. I was brought on to generate more leads via their websites. Although, they aren't letting me do what I think is best. So I need help convincing them. Can you please help me prove them wrong? We are an online reseller/distributor. We sell our products under one brand. We sell a wide variety of widgets that are manufactured by several different companies. We have 9 unique web properties and 50 landing pages. Each website and landing page is on a unique domain, design, and purpose. I would like to consolidate everything to one robust, e-commerce website that will reside on our primary domain. My bosses are convinced that more websites are better because it will prevent our competitors from ranking above us. We can "block" them from ranking on all the main keywords. They are also convinced that domain name plays a major role in SEO. But I've got that part covered What do you think?
Branding | | reusabletranspack0 -
Changing domain name and site design while recovering from penguin? Still SEO power in EMDs?
Our website recently suffered from a penguin update courtesy of some black hat techniques used by an SEO company we hired a few years ago. We are working on cleaning up and disavowing the old spammy links, but at the same time this penalty has hit us while we were working on making some major changes to our website. As a law firm we have 2 separate practice websites we are planning to merge under 1 domain to help boost our local results. Our problem is that the domain names for each practice are specific to the type of law they practice, so we will have to move both practices to a branded name domain that works for both practices. I thought since traffic was already affected because of the penguin update this might be an opportune time to change the domain name, but since I am far from an expert at SEO I'm wondering if there are variables I am unaware of that might make this decision a very bad one. Also we currently have exact match domains for our two different sites -- the way I understand it EMDs don't carry the same SEO weight they once did, but the firm is worried that losing the EMDs is going to cause a dramatic drop in traffic. If we keep the EMDs but permanently redirect them to the new site, will it maintain their SEO value? Would google consider that black hat and possibly penalize us for it in the future? Thanks for any advice or insight!!
Branding | | MyOwnSEO0 -
Need a full web design TEAM.
I'm an SEO manager for a company in Los Angeles. You can see our website here: https://opiates.com. I've been at the company for about 3 months, and in that time we've almost had our website re-done twice. It is badly in need of an overhaul in terms of design and navigation, but at the same time we can't afford to lose the organic traffic that we currently have. Does anyone have recommendations for web development firms that can take on a BIG project and work with me to preserve the SE traffic that we currently have? Thanks
Branding | | Waismann0 -
Google displays the wrong store hours. Can anyone help lead me to the fix?
When doing the following search on Google "Ticket King Milwaukee hours" we see the wrong hours displayed at the top of the page. Just to the left of our places page, you will see "Tuesday hours 8:30-1:00 pm." That 1 pm closing comes up for every weekday, even though we are open until 6 pm weekdays, and 3 pm on Saturdays. I have checked the hours listed on our G+ page, our "Places for Business" page, our "about us" page on our website, and can't find where they are getting this incorrect data. I even went out and checked most of the "List your business" sites that I have registered with.
Branding | | Ticket_King
I have submitted this to Google, but have not heard back. Does anyone have any ideas as to how I can fix this, or at least find out where this bad data is coming from? I did find a company blog post from 2010 that listed our ours in a somewhat confusing way, but it was still correct. (I have since fixed that old post.)0 -
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 -
Anyone have any experience with freelance graphic designer sites?
I'm wanting to get a few things designed for our site, and I was curious if anyone has any experience using any of the companies online where you can hire graphic designers. It looks like a lot of these companies use people over seas, and although some of them are talented, I don't think their styles are the same as I'm used to here. (Hope that doesn't sound bad...I'm not meaning it like that.) Does anyone have any suggestions for a good company to use online? Thanks.
Branding | | NoahsDad1 -
Infographic Design
Hi Guys I am looking to outsource some design work to have infogrpahics designed, this will also include the gathering of data and distrubution etc... Can anyone recommend any agency's, specialist infographic design company's? Matthew
Branding | | EwanFisher0