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
-
Standardising of Company Name Across The Web Question
Good Morning All There are two variations of our company name on the website. Sometimes the name is listed as "name and name" and sometimes listed as "name & name" The domain is obviously www.nameandname.co.uk I believe I am correct in saying that we would be wise to go through and standardise, using one form or the other? Secondly, my main question is would we be wise to use "name and name" as the default, as the word "and" and not the symbol "&" is in the domain itself? Many Thanks
Branding | | ruislip180 -
Can you recommend any USA web testers
Hi We are a UK based company who sell in the US, DE, FR and AU. We have been selling in the USA for a few years now, mainly through Amazon and few key retailers we have a website for direct sales but we are finding extremely difficult to convert our traffic. we are looking ta conversion rates of 0.19% We have over 2000 email subscriber list which we are emailing on regular basis, from a first person perspective, telling them the befits of products, competitions etc using soft sell tactics. We have a large Facebook, pinterest and twitter following The site functions well there's room for improvement but in the UK the sales are a lot higher. I'm looking for a way to test our site on an american audience tos ee if we are conveying the right messages. Although we speak pretty much the same language what our customers in UK like could be completely different? Our american site is www.tidy-books.com any suggestion on how to continue would be great thanks
Branding | | tidybooks0 -
PR Web Press Release for Links
I was wondering if submitting press release, such as to PR Web, if the links, on the press release linking back to our site still have any value in today's SEO world? If so, what is the right way to take out the most value of a Press Release.?? Please advise, Morris
Branding | | PrintEZ0 -
Brand Search Results- how do you make sure spammy links don't hurt your brand
We are seeing a spammer start ranking #4 for our branded search result on google. This could potentially be hurting our brand. Any suggestions that have worked for you recently? For more context we already have: Create Social profiles (Linkedin, G+, FB etc) which are engaged and frequently updated Analyzed Domain Authority, Links and recency of the spammy article. The domain and the page authority seems weak, and the spammy article is dated Dec of last year Looked at various posts on http://moz.com/community/q/reputation-management. Thanks in advance!
Branding | | SEMEnthusiast0 -
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 -
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