Before I leave for an extended time away from the office I have this habit of always creating an unattainable to-do list before I leave. Writing this post was one of those tasks, so here I am typing away mid-transit while waiting for my next flight. It's actually very peaceful and calming to have new surroundings, except for the passengers late for boarding. What I have done a lot of since leaving is check my phone, and I'm talking Facebook. It's been Slack messaging but mainly looking up websites EXPECTING that they are all mobile friendly, and not just mobile friendly but that they have really thought about my experience when on the site. I've been mostly satisfied but still left wondering when I come across a site that is fundamentally impossible to navigate. Then I look around and almost everyone is on their phone looking at something. It goes to show that there are still so many businesses and organisations that just don't see it as important that they're shutting out half their potential audience.

In 2015 (that's basically two years ago for whoever is counting) Google decided to lower the ranking of sites that weren't mobile ready https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2015/02/finding-more-mobile-friendly-search.html. That's a long time ago... yet it's still so common. There's quote by Peter McLachlan, co-founder of Mobify, "Saying mobile internet should be like saying colour tv" we'll use the word mobile a lot less".

I understand that a big factor stopping businesses from making their sites mobile friendly is the idea that it will cost a lot. The truth is that it doesn't have to. At ITworx we have revamped countless sites and the actual mechanics of implementing a new mobile responsive design on their sites is not that difficult. The main cost has in our experience been a case of our customers realising that they are long overdue branding changes and then making countless improvements at the same time, and this I don't believe is a bad thing.

If you have your site already on some of the more popular CMS (Content Management System) platforms such as DNN, WordPress, Drupal etc. then you have it easy as you don't need to start your site again from scratch, you dont need to rewrite content. This is because you will have the choice of buying a new skin/template (in the case of DNN) which can be easily implemented or you could build a completely custom design (we all want to be different) without too much bother.

So in summary... and because my flight is about to leave I my quick summary is that you should definitely make sure your site works on iPhones and Android phones and small tablets because if it isn't you're missing out. Just look around you, everyone is on their phones. Travel sites... DIY sites... I can't think of any industry where you can just ignore mobile phone users.