Responsive Web Design

Most of your visitors are on a phone

For a lot of local businesses, well over half the people who land on the site are looking at it on a phone held in one hand. If the page was really designed for a big monitor and squeezed down afterwards, that shows: text too small to read without pinching, links crammed together, a menu that's awkward to open, and the odd column hanging off the side of the screen so you have to scroll sideways. Whoooop Ltd has worked in full-stack development for over 15 years, and responsive design — building so a page rearranges itself to fit whatever it's opened on — is part of how we work rather than an add-on.

What "responsive" means once you're actually using it

It's not just shrinking everything to fit. A page that responds well changes its shape so each screen gets a layout that suits it — and the things below are where the difference is felt.

Fixing a site that falls apart on mobile

If you've got a site that looks fine on your laptop but a mess on a phone, that's a common thing to put right. We start on real devices rather than by dragging a browser window narrow, because the two don't always behave the same. From there it's usually a case of reworking the layout so it reflows, sorting out the navigation, and going through the templates page type by page type — the home page, a service page, a contact page — so each one holds together at phone width. Often the structure underneath is sound and it's the presentation that needs the work.

Building mobile-first when it's a new site

On a new build we tend to design the phone version first and let it grow out to the larger screens, rather than the other way round. It keeps you honest: if the message fits and reads well in a narrow column, it'll be fine with more room, and you avoid cramming in things that only ever made sense on a wide layout. You can read more about how we approach a build on our web development page.

Mobile-friendly and fast aren't the same thing

They're easy to lump together, but they're different jobs. A page can fit a phone perfectly and still take an age to appear; it can load in a flash and still be fiddly to use with a thumb. This page is about the second one — how the site behaves once it's on screen. If your problem is that pages are slow to show up, that's a separate piece of work covered on our website speed optimisation page, and the two often go together on the same project.

When a retrofit isn't worth it

Sometimes a site is built on something so dated that bending it to work on phones costs more than it's worth, and you'd be patching it again in a year. We'll say so rather than take the work on regardless. If that's where you are, a clean rebuild is usually better value over time — our website redesign and rebuild page covers how that works, including keeping the search rankings you've already earned.