So, why do we design websites on desktop first?

Does that mean we care more about desktop users? Are we just going to shrink everything down when we get to mobile? And haven't we all been told for years that everything should be mobile-first?

All fair questions. And because we get asked this A LOT, we thought we'd explain a little more about how we work 😅.

At MadeByShape, we design desktop-first because starting with the largest version of a website gives our designers the freedom to establish the full creative direction before our developers build that experience responsively across different screen sizes.

We're not stuck in 2009. And mobile definitely isn't an afterthought for us.

Simple. It gives us the biggest canvas to work with.

We can establish everything that could form part of the experience – typography, layouts, imagery, navigation, interactions, functionality and all the other good stuff – without immediately restricting ourselves to a smaller screen.

If we designed mobile-first, we'd be starting with the most restricted version of the website, where certain elements naturally need to be simplified or removed.

We'd rather start by asking "what's the best website we can create?" and then work out how that experience should adapt when there's less space.

For the bespoke websites we create, that gives us so much more creative freedom. We're not choosing a template, dropping your logo in and changing a button colour. The design needs to communicate something about your business, and starting with the biggest canvas gives us the room to properly explore that.

This is the important bit: desktop-first doesn't mean desktop-only.

We're creating one responsive website, not separate desktop, tablet and mobile websites.

Our designers establish the website at its largest size. From there, our developers build it responsively so it naturally adapts as the available space changes.

Layouts might reflow. Typography might scale. Navigation might change. Images might move. We're not taking the desktop website and squeezing it until it fits on an iPhone. Promise.

And there's a reason we don't design every possible size. There are loads of different phones, tablets, laptops and monitors out there. One static mobile design could never represent how your website will look across all of them.

Responsive web development fills in those gaps.

With all the talk about mobile-first, you'd be forgiven for thinking nobody visits websites on a laptop anymore.

That's not actually the case.

Statcounter's UK data for July 2026 puts desktop at around 50.6% of web usage, compared with approximately 45.1% for mobile.

Of course, that varies from business to business. But the point is, desktop hasn't disappeared. Far from it.

And we're not choosing between giving desktop or mobile users a good experience anyway. Starting with desktop is simply the first step in creating a website that ultimately works across both.

Not seeing a separate mobile design doesn't mean nobody is checking how your website looks on one.

Once your website has been built, it goes through a full quality control process across our design and development teams. We test it across different devices and screen sizes to make sure the design translates properly, everything behaves as it should and the experience follows UX and UI best practices.

If something doesn't work at a certain size, we fix it before it reaches you.

So no, mobile isn't something we suddenly remember the week before launch 😂. It's part of how the website is developed, tested and delivered.