A concern regarding responsive website design came up when speaking to a dealer a few days ago. I have to admit when we shifted to all responsive it was also a concern for me. The issue was that responsive websites don’t have a “view full site” link.
Why do we click on the view full site link in the first place?
If we step back and ask ourselves this question, the answer is pretty clear. We revert to pinching and zooming the full/alternate site when we aren’t finding the content we are looking for. In most cases the content that we are looking for is something that we have seen on the full site before going to the mobile site. Or maybe an ad we encountered in another medium (tv, radio, newspaper) and aren’t seeing any trace of that on the mobile site.
That’s the strength of Responsive design
A responsive website Is the same content as the desktop site, just organized to be usable on a smaller device. It is of course important to keep the “sent” of the full site as well as make sure that you don’t remove access to any of the internal pages. Keep in mind that the “home” page of your site is really just an index so that visitors can get to the page/content that they want. So make sure that you maintain familiarity; buttons, colors, etc. Then make the navigation clean and to the point while staying congruent with the full site. If you have a big site with a lot of pages consider creating internal index type pages so that you don’t have a mobile menu that is unusable. On the full site you could have sub menu items and on mobile just the top level links. Once on the top level page the additional sub pages would be available to navigate to.
The true power of responsive
Ultimately a well designed responsive website has no need for a “view full site” button/link. This is especially true since the internal content pages should work great on any device if done correctly, and this is where the real “meat” of you website exists anyway. Now you are free to promote Facebook posts or do PPC to an internal page without worrying what device your users are coming from, and whether or not the content on your full site is the same as your mobile site etc., etc.