Mobile-first, responsive design, AMPs--there are a lot of buzz words for mobile-friendly web circulating right now. Whether you haven't redesigned your site in a few years or you just launched a new site in 2015, you'll want to brush up on the latest two trends in the mobile world. Mobile-First This is a buzz word being used to describe both a lifestyle and the web design process that caters to that lifestyle. Google's data has shown a rise in mobile usage over the past few years, and now it's becoming apparent that a significant portion of Internet users are accessing the web on mobile devices exclusively, meaning some users will never see the desktop version of your site. As a result, Google is placing emphasis on your mobile site's user experience. Google's own senior VP of search has been studying his own natural reactions to the mobile web by utilizing it exclusively for over a year. If that doesn't tell you something about what to anticipate from Google search rankings, I'm not sure what does. The original concept of responsive design arose out of the need to have a web design function on as many browsers and devices as possible. This meant that we took a standard website design and just scaled it back, removing content and features as the device got smaller. However, the problem this presents is that a lot of times the amazing design elements and technology that make a desktop site sparkle often do not scale down well to a mobile site. The mobile site in this instance is more of a pared-down version of the desktop site that doesn't take into consideration every nuance of the mobile user's experience. An even bigger problem with desktop-first design is that mobile phones and tablets have much slower download speeds. When we design for desktop first, we're asking the mobile site to load all the content from desktop and hide what's not needed. This is why you usually see a basic responsive site loading slower on mobile than desktop. The mobile-first design process solves these issues by beginning with the mobile site design and enhancing the content for the desktop version. The result is that there are more design considerations given to the mobile user, such as less text and large icons that are easy to thumb-tap. By only asking the mobile site to load the most minimal content, we're able to provide lightning fast access to every page of the site. AMPs AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Page and is an effort spearheaded by Google to provide an even faster user experience on mobile for certain types of content. AMPs have been designed to only work on webpages whose purpose is to be read, not interacted with. Right now, the only sites that are utilizing AMPs are news-related. WordPress is developing plugins that will allow blog users to create AMPs with ease. Google has already announced that it will favor AMPs in certain search results. If you are writing blog content to rank for a specific keyword, using AMPs could help your content rank higher (note that using AMP on your blog will not cause your entire website to rank higher). There's no need to consider AMP pages for your main website content, at least right now. AMPs have big limitations in design and functionality and are only useful in situations where the text content is really all that matters. On a builder site, your photos and branding play a large enough role that you'd be better served by a mobile-first design than converting your pages to AMPs. However, this is a brand new effort by Google and only time will tell if the use of AMPs will spread to other types of web content. If you have questions about mobile-first, AMPs, or would like to know more about how Builder Designs is doing mobile in 2016, email marketing@builderdesigns.com.