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The 4 Screens Your Website Needs To Appear Correctly On

  • By James QUINN
  • 03 Feb, 2016

We live in a multi-screen world. Does your website also?

It's entirely possible, and very likely, that a visitor to your website could be viewing it from: a large monitor connected to a desktop, a small to medium sized laptop, a 10" tablet or a 7-8" tablet, or a range of smartphone screen sizes anywhere from 3" to 6". For some, they may even get to your webpage from a smart TV now, that's maybe 50-70" of screen space! How do you optimize your website for all of those screens? Do you even have to? Why can't you just have one website? Well, the good news is, you can actually have both. You can have one website that works for all the possible screens your website will be viewed on. Let me explain.


Why do you need a multi-screen website?

Let's start with the most important question here, and that's why you even need a multi-screen website. Let's take myself for an example. I'm a mid-thirty working professional. While I'm not addicted to my devices, I do use them throughout the day. At work I use a 13" Macbook Pro, connected to a 23" Cinema Display.  At home I use a Mac desktop connected to a 23" monitor. On the go I use an iPhone 6s Plus and also my iPad Air 2. (Yes, I'm a major Apple fanboy if you didn't realize). The point is, in order for your website to grab my attention and impress me, your website needs to be optimized for any of those four screens. From the "smallest" of the 5.5" iPhone 6s Plus to the largest 23" monitor and the 10" Tablet and 13" Laptop in between. That's a tall order. If your website is only setup to work on a traditional desktop monitor, I'll be super frustrated viewing it on my smartphone. Even though I'm very familiar with browsing through non-mobile websites, it's still frustrating to pinch and zoom my way through and then tapping on the wrong link because it's too tiny for my giant fingers that also probably has BBQ sauce all over them. Oh by the way, it's not just me. This infographic on mobile usage shows that 64% percent of the people who use their smartphone as the primary device to access the web, and a whopping 51% of smartphone owners between the ages of 50-64 use their smartphone as primary internet source. It's not just for the "facebook kids" anymore. EVERYONE is using their smartphone. Optimize your website to work on their screen, please.

One website for all devices.

The best part about all of this is, you can actually have one website that works for all device types. How is this even possible? Well, I would love to say it's some sort of harry potter trick, but it's really not. It's actually been available for several years now,  but it's only been since April 21st with Google's Mobile-geddon that people have started to listen and pay attention.

In a nutshell, you need a responsive website. A responsive website literally Responds to the screen size it's being viewed on and adapts the content appropriately. It doesn't look so much and go: "well is this a smartphone, an android or an iPhone, is it a tablet or a laptop". It adjusts to the screen size. Want a quick and easy way to see if a website is responsive? Just open a website from your desktop browser and change the window size so it's really small, it should automagically respond and change it's appearance as if it's a smartphone. If it doesn't, it could be for only one of two reasons.  1) It's just not responsive at all and you need to update it. or 2) It's actually a RESS website, or Responsive with Server Side Support, also called Dynamic Responsive Websites. Ok, mind explosion here. Let me break it down real quick here, but if you're feeling brave, check out this blog post on the full details.

Responsive with Server Side Support basically looks at your device type and can CHANGE the content per device. That's how Breeze Digital Media builds all of our websites with, as it is the best way to do so. For instance, while it may be engaging to have a large background video auto-playing on a desktop with a fast broadband connection, it may take a while to load if someone's on a smartphone with spotty coverage. So let's have the smartphone offer the video as a "play" button instead and increase the user experience. Or how about smartphones. Did you know that the single most common action taken on a smartphone is to get the phone number of the business to call it? So let's display a Click-To-Call button on the smartphone, but not show it on a desktop or tablet because well, you won't be calling from your desktop or tablet. Unless of course you are me, and you have Apple's hand-off enabled on your desktop to transfer calls to your smartphone. Enough of that fanboy stuff. The point is, we can tailor the experience for your customer based on the device they are viewing it on so it's not only responsive to the screen size, but it's also adapted for the device type.

Want even more performance than that? Of course you do, who wouldn't. Let's take that a step further and also dynamically change the content, based on visitor behavior. Even more mind-blowing, we can change the content based on triggers such as time of day viewing, amount of visits to your website, geographic location, or even a campaign URL. So let's say your a restaurant and it's 12pm, why don't we show your customer your lunch menu right away, since that's likely what they're looking for at that time of day. It will only show during lunch time, and it will show the dinner menu starting at let's say 5:00pm, all done automagically.

Next Steps?

While this may sound a bit technical at first, it's really not. I promise you. We speak human. We speak local business. We speak YOU. Let's work together and come up with a solution that works for you. Let's get your website working on every screen out there and give your customers a fantastic experience and convert them from a visitor into a customer.

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