July 29 2013
It's hard to ignore. The buzz this year has been all about the push for responsive designs.
The sales pitch is "You need to make your site display properly on a mobile device."
Well I think it is crappy advice. Especially for real esate agent websites.
Consider what the audience is looking for when they punch up your site on their mobile and we'll see how responsive design fails to match this.
When your audience is on their phone, they have only a few common actions in mind.
They are not (initially) looking to:
What you might be able to convince them to do:
A responsive website is one that uses different style sheets to reconfigure a website's content into a more optimal layout based on the browser resolution. In English: it reorganizes all of your content to fit the screen size.
Your current website is (meant to be) a huge content resource of listings, blogs, neighborhood info, and the like. It is designed to be experienced on a full-sized monitor. The header, the navigation menus, the calls to action, the blog content, the sidebar content, the quick search, the footer... it was designed for a full screen experience.
Responsive designs only satisfy one issue when it comes to mobile: They make the content easier to see. However, taking a website that was built for a full screen experience and reconfiguring IT ALL to fit onto a mobile device causes two undesirable and detrimental effects.
You need to start from scratch.
You need to rethink your approach.
You need to provide an experience that gives your mobile visitors what they came for.
What is a mobile web app?
It is a website designed to elegantly take advantage of a touch screen experience. It has all the slick features of a mobile (native) app, and all the accessibility of a website. By using a web app, you can create an experience that displays only the most important elements of your website in an intuitive manner, for mobile visitors.
Here are a few web app design advantages:
To view the original article, visit the Real Estate Tomato blog.