Did you know that within five years there will be more mobile devices than people.
By that time more people will find churches on a mobile device than on a traditional computer. How does your site look on these mobile devices? Is it readable? Is the featured information still, well, featured?
A popular solution to building a site that works well on all platforms is called “Responsive Web Design”. Responsive sites automatically adjust to work on the size screen you are using. As they get smaller they adapt more for touch screen usage.
You can tell when you are on a responsive site by making the width narrower and seeing how it responds. I’ve built two responsive sites now URLoved.com and TrinityWaverly.org.
Here’s trinitywaverly.org in full view:
Here’s trinitywaverly.org in fun-sized mode:
Notice now the main menu uses touch to operate.
I’ve found that the content management systems for making a site responsive aren’t perfect; usually have to give up something, but it beats the alternative of building two separate sites. Here are the biggest problems with Responsive designs that I’ve encountered so far:
1. They are boxy. Most of them work by stacking boxes on top of each other as the width gets narrower.
2. They leave lots of white space. You will have to give up some real estate on your page to allow things to shift around easier.
3. Images don’t like to cooperate. They either wont re-size properly or they re-size in undesired ways.
The systems for designing Responsively are getting better and becoming more standardized. I look forward to time when websites can be made Responsively with ease.
If you are building a new website I would strongly consider a Responsive design. People looking for a church are going to be more apt to like what they see on their mobile device.