The whole world is going responsive, it’s the only way says Google and even the web-spam guru, Matt Cutts has been banging on about getting responsive for the last 6 months.
Except, not everyone is there yet. Here is a short list of sites that, surprisingly, are not actually responsive. We’ll call this the Wall of Shame:
- Amazon: It’s huge and the UI is so old it predates most Internet users but this monolith has gone down the App route. Will this change?
- BBC: Bits works and they are playing catch-up since it’s last major update in 2011. With an annual budget of £30m you’d have thought they would have this nailed by now.
- YouTube: Yes, there is an app for the mobile experience is very crummy. As a Google property and the second most-searched site in the world this is a major omission.
- EBay: My personal bugbear, it’s awful to use on a mobile browser and the app is just so different to the desktop experience. Yuk.
- Apple: Holding the lion’s share of the mobile data market they seem to want to cling to the walled-world of apps. That will change in due course and could see the beginning of the end of App dominance.
These sites are all big monsters, porting something like the BBC to a responsive platform would be a huge job but all these sites have one thing in common – they all use legacy platforms developed using five-year old plus technology to deliver content. For most they can’t easily lose their “naughty noughties” tag until they migrate onto something all together more up to date – calling WordPress…
We’ve been building mobile first since 2010 and every client we have has a responsive site, 100% client adoption!
By Martin Dower
