It’s highly likely that more than half of the user traffic on your veterinary website comes through a smartphone. Mobile usage is exploding, and with it comes a unique opportunity to drive more business to your animal hospital. In this article, you’ll learn about the basic principles of good mobile design, along with actionable tips that you can use to increase the amount of business your mobile website generates for your veterinary hospital.
There are essentially two options to make your website mobile-friendly. The first option is to commission a dedicated mobile website to be built. This was a very popular avenue a few years ago, but it’s not recommended anymore. The vastly superior option is to utilize “responsive” design technology in order to provide an excellent mobile experience. If your website wasn’t built with responsive technology, it is enormously beneficial to address this issue right now.
Responsive design is a technique that was pioneered in order to allow the design elements on a website to adapt to the particular size of the screen of the display. In the past, a website would look like a miniature version of itself on a smartphone. With responsive design, it re-arranges itself to for a consistent but uniquely well adapted experience.
In responsive design, your engineer will identify certain “break points.” This means the website will adapt itself differently at different screen sizes. This is important because there are so many devices with varying screen sizes – think about all of the smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktops in existence now. You’ll want at least two different break-points. One for a tablet-sized device screen (say 9-11 inches) and one for a smartphone-sized screen (around 5 inches).
After you identify and implement the proper break points, you’ll want to do QA testing. Look for formatting issues across different devices (be sure to test across Android and Apple). Make sure that your images are appropriately centered, and that no text is hidden behind design elements. Also make sure all of your forms are optimized for mobile.
Implementing responsive design technology will raise you in the search rankings and will result in a vastly superior user experience – which means a much higher conversion rate. Add those two together, and it means more people walking through your waiting room doors.
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