Peter Baron
Senior Product Marketing Manager
Whipplehill
(This post originally ran on Inside WhippleHill)
The evidence is building and it’s becoming
harder to ignore — an ever increasing number of people are using phones
& tablets to tackle all manner of tasks on the web. From booking a
ride on Uber to scanning in a check from your phone — our mobile devices
are central to how we interact online.
Think this isn’t true for schools? Just look at some of these stats through the lens of a family researching private schools:
- iPads and iPhones make up more than 20% of the web traffic visiting all WhippleHill servers.
- The average American spends more than two hours a day on their mobile device.
Consider all of these facts (and look below
for even more!) and it becomes very clear, very quickly, that it’s
critical your school’s web site looks great on more than a laptop or
desktop browser — it absolutely has to shine on a phone or tablet.
The last thing you want is for someone to
bounce off your site due to frustration over having to two finger zoom
to see what’s what on the page. That’s where Responsive Web Design (RWD)
comes into play. When you build a responsive site, you can feel
confident that it’ll adapt and look great on whatever device someone’s
using (phone, tablet, laptop, you name it). The zoom goes away!
We’ve written a lot about the subject (see here & here),
but the benefits are clear. Through CSS3 media queries, a fluid grid
layout, and flexible images, a site using RWD adapts to your screen’s
resolution in order to deliver the very best viewing experience. For
this reason, every site we launch using onMessage is responsive by default. We won’t build a site that isn’t.
Need more convincing?
Check out this fantastic infographic (arranged by Whipplehill’s in-house guru Mark Christensen).
It further strengthens the case as to why mobile should be front &
center in your school’s web strategy. Click for a larger view.