The move to responsiveness has been a long time coming. It's something we've been wanting to do for the last three years. The reason it has taken so long is simply because the Awakening website is extremely complicated, we knew it would be hell to redesign every single page. Responsive design essentially means that the website will look great on any platform; desktop, tablet and phone.
Google announced in 2016 that their search engine algorithm was now starting to penalize websites that were failing to tackle responsiveness and be mobile-friendly. Since the announcement Awakening has slowly been dropping in website ranking, despite maintaining a large regular audience. Essentially we were forced into the redesign, but we're so very glad that we tackled the huge task and have made it through to the other side! We're proud to say that we're not just mobile-friendly now, but we are fully responsive.
The portion of our audience base that uses our website from a phone or tablet has steadily been growing over the years. The figure currently stands at about 46% of you visit us from your phones. We hope that you guys are pleasantly surprised at no longer having to zoom in to read tiny text. We're sorry that this has taken so long!
I'll be honest we really did struggle with the redesign. Responsive design is a hard thing to get right. Many websites today have the same look and feel, this is due to responsive design being very limiting. Essentially you have to design the site in a way that looks good on any screen size. It's easy to design a site to look good at just one size (which we previously had). We tried extremely hard to design the website in a way that is as unique as responsive design allows - this is probably most apparent on the new look Awakening Fighter Profiles.
The Awakening website currently has some 20,000 or so pages. With such a huge task, we are aware that on the occasional page there are minor design glitches that need to be addressed. We will continue tweaking to make it perfect until the cows come home. Please let us know if you keep seeing the same glitch in a months time as it may have fallen through the cracks. Thanks for your support, happy browsing!
If you want to find out more detail about any of these reasons please choose a link below.
Website 4.0, streamlining work-flow
Website 4.0, sustainability
Website 4.0, why the change?
