We're fortunate to live in this era of computers, the internet, and AI.
Sign-off day for a website usually looks about the same. The meeting room is hooked up to a projector, or the owner turns their laptop around, and the designer clicks through page by page: the homepage hero image, the services section, About Us, the contact form. The screens are clean, the text is crisp, everyone nods, signs, and it goes live.
Nothing about that sign-off was wrong. It was just looking at the wrong screen.
The first time a customer meets you, it's usually not in a meeting room. They might be on the metro, waiting at a red light, or in a lull over dinner with friends when they hear your company's name and pick up their phone to look it up. That one scroll is your website's first real appearance. And that version is the one almost nobody looked at closely on sign-off day.
01Google was looking at the mobile version all along
First, something a business owner doesn't need any technical background to follow, but absolutely needs to know: when Google indexes and ranks your website today, it mainly looks at the mobile version.
There's a long timeline behind this. Mobile search volume overtook desktop in a number of countries around 2015. In November 2016, Google floated the idea of "Mobile-First Indexing." From July 1, 2019, newly launched sites were indexed by their mobile version by default. And on October 31, 2023, Google's John Mueller announced on the official blog that the switch was complete.
Zac, author of the Chinese-language SEO book 《SEO實戰密碼》, put a very blunt footnote on this: once the switch was complete, the name Mobile-First Indexing wasn't accurate anymore. It should be called Mobile Only Indexing. There's only a mobile index now, and no desktop index.
The version nobody looked at closely on sign-off day is exactly the version Google uses to decide where you rank.
That's enough about Google's side for now. How machines read a website is for our piece "Redesigned, but AI Can't Read It." This one looks at the other end: the person holding the phone.
02The mobile version isn't a shrunken version
A lot of people picture the mobile version as the desktop version shrunk down and squeezed into a narrower frame. So the mindset at sign-off is: "It's fine on the computer, so it's probably fine on the phone too."
On the question "what is a responsive website," a business owner only needs to know one sentence: the same URL and the same content, laid out again to fit the screen width. The key words are "laid out again." The layout on a phone is a separate piece of design, not the same picture made smaller. It has its own ways of going wrong, and those mistakes are completely invisible on a big screen. Most of what people call a "broken mobile layout" comes from right here.
We've stepped in this ourselves, more than once.
On OAKOrc's own site, the services page was originally designed so that the starting price only appeared when you moved your mouse over a service card. On a computer, the effect was clean and layered. The problem is that phones have no mouse, and a finger can't "hover," so the design effectively hid the price. We later handled touch devices separately: on phones, the price shows directly, without waiting for anyone to "hover."
The second was the navigation bar at the top. On desktop, the nav bar has an orange "Start a project" button. On a phone, it fights for space with the "Services, Journal, About" links. We later removed that button from the top of the mobile version and let a full-width button on the homepage's first screen handle the same action instead. A position that's a given on desktop has to give way on a phone.
The third was the smallest, and it says the most. In the "Who this is for" section of the services page, each item starts with a short bold phrase. On a computer, everything looked fine. On a phone, those bold words got squeezed to two characters per line, and each description was torn to pieces. It took two rounds to fix properly. Signing off at a computer, you'd never see it from start to finish.
The three have one thing in common: viewed on a computer, they all passed.
03What you remove on mobile, Google can't see either
There's an even more invisible kind of problem, because on a phone it looks "nice and clean."
To make the mobile version a little cleaner, some sites remove paragraphs, images, or even entire sections that appear on desktop. It does feel slicker to scroll. But since Google indexes the mobile version, the removed content might as well not exist: it won't be indexed, and the keywords and rankings those words could have brought in disappear along with it.
The way 《SEO實戰密碼》 puts it, the main content, navigation and internal links, images, and the various tags and structured data on the mobile and desktop versions all have to stay consistent. That doesn't mean the mobile version has to lay everything out in full: non-core parts like navigation and the footer can be collapsed.
So the principle comes down to one line: collapse it if you like, but don't remove it.
04Take your own phone, turn off Wi-Fi, and walk through it once
At your next sign-off, or today, do this:
Take out your own phone, turn off Wi-Fi, use mobile data, and walk the path a customer would take, once.
There are three conditions in that sentence. Drop any one of them, and what you're checking isn't the version the customer sees.
Use your own phone, not the designer's. The designer's phone is usually newer, with a bigger screen, and they've already looked at this site dozens of times. Your phone is closer to your customers' phones. If someone in the company uses an older, smaller model, borrow it and walk through again.
Turn off Wi-Fi. The meeting-room network is fast and stable. Your customers' isn't. In a basement, or somewhere with two bars of signal left, how long the site takes to show its first screen is something you can only measure on mobile data.
Come in from search, not from the link the designer sent you. Customers don't have that link. Open Google, search your company name, or your service plus your area, and click through from the results. First check whether the title line and description read like you, then see which page you land on.
Then follow the customer's path down, asking yourself along the way:
- ✓ On the first screen you land on, without scrolling, can you tell what you do?
- ✓ Do you have to zoom in with two fingers to read the text?
- ✓ Is there any page where you have to scroll sideways to see all of the content?
- ✓ Can a finger hit the buttons and links accurately? Does a tap land on the one next to it?
- ✓ Once the menu is open, can you tell where each label leads? Are there so many options you don't know which to tap first?
- ✓ Does a pop-up or floating button cover half the screen, with no way to close it in sight?
- ✓ Starting from the homepage, how many taps does it take to find services, prices, and contact details?
- ✓ Can you finish the contact form on a phone? Are there too many fields? Does the keyboard cover the submit button?
- ✓ When you tap the phone number, does it dial directly?
- ✓ Finally, open the desktop version and compare side by side: has any section or image gone missing on mobile?
The reasoning behind the menu item is simple: navigation should give simple paths to the most important pages, and every label should say clearly where it leads. Text size, whether you have to scroll sideways, whether buttons are big enough, whether forms are short enough: these are the most basic requirements for a mobile page.
Nothing on this list requires knowing code. Every item only asks whether a customer gets stuck at this point. Wherever they get stuck is what this sign-off sends back.
Write down every spot that doesn't work, attach screenshots, and send them all back together.
05Why sign-off always happens on a computer
Signing off on a computer is a habit with its own inertia.
Design mockups are usually drawn for desktop first, because the canvas is big and easy to present. Pitches happen in meeting rooms, and meeting rooms have projectors. The people who sign off sit at their desks, and on the desk is a computer. The whole process, from start to finish, takes place in an environment unlike the customer's. Nobody is deliberately ignoring the phone. The phone just never got written into the process.
The desktop version matters too, of course. For a B2B company, customers may well be looking you up from their desks during working hours, and that visit counts just as much. Zac's book even notes that, for English-language websites, you can to some degree stop worrying much about desktop optimization. We don't go that far. Both versions need checking. The order just needs to flip: phone first, then computer.
06Put mobile sign-off in the contract
If you're about to build a new website, or you're in the middle of a redesign, there's one thing you can do right now: write mobile sign-off into the sign-off criteria.
A single line saying "supports mobile browsing" isn't enough. Spell it out: at sign-off, the client walks the path above once, on their own phone, on mobile data; anything that doesn't work goes on the revision list. Put that clause in, and everyone in the meeting room on sign-off day will take out their phone one more time.
When we build websites, layouts for phone, tablet, and desktop are already part of the quote. See our responsive web design service (from NT$ 45,000). But more important than who builds it is whether that sign-off step actually happens.
Back to that meeting room.
The website on the big screen is beautiful. No doubt about that. It's just that that version is for the person signing. What the customer sees is the narrow version on a phone, slowed down by a weak signal, mis-tapped by a finger. That's the main stage.
Design that can be trusted. Technology that can be understood. And being trusted starts with the site holding up in the moment it's in a customer's hand.
Rooted in craft. Built for the new wild.