Ever since mobile hand held devices such as iPhones became a staple of our lives, it became clear that website designs must accommodate their small screens in order to appeal to many potential clients who increasingly access the internet via mobile devices. Realizing that, many web design companies and businesses started building separate mobile versions of their websites and placing them under .mobi domain names.
These were wrong moves since search engines treated the .mobi websites as new sites under new domains. Those separate mobile websites did not automatically get Internet reputations form their “parent” sites and as a result ranked considerably lower by search engines. That all changed with introduction of the Responsive Web Design (RWD) - an approach when a website layout automatically adapts to a screen size of the device (desktop, tablet, phone, TV, etc.) to which the website contents is delivered. Single website with adaptive layout – that is what we call mobile-friendly website (or just mobile website for short).
As the Internet traffic from mobile devices has exceeded half of total internet traffic, website mobile friendliness has become a necessity, not an option. This became especially evident when Google started boosting ratings of the mobile-friendly websites over the websites that are not mobile friendly. You can read this as "Google penalizes websites that are not mobile friendly".
We used to offer responsive web design as an option to our new clients. Not anymore. Nowadays, it is a requirement, and we will make your website look great and fully functional on all mobile devices. It is also an integral part of the overall Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy.