In response to waves of feedback asking for a more intuitive mobile experience, eBay (News – Alert)-owned classified listing service Gumtree, has rolled out a new HTML5-based responsive website as well as a dedicated iPad app. The company reported that 60 percent of its traffic is on mobile devices, highlighting the need for a website that caters to this growing section of its user base.

“We now have more visits from mobile devices so we wanted to bring a level of responsiveness to the website that meets this trend,” said Polly Howden, mobile product manager at Gumtree. “We already have apps for smartphones but we know some people visit the site on the web, so we wanted to provide them with an optimized version of the site.”

Redesigned and recoded using the latest HTML5 standards, the website is fully responsive, meaning it can adjust itself automatically based on screen size to provide the most attractive and usable version. Gumtree took a mobile-first approach, designing the website to be optimized for the smallest screen size and then expanding it incrementally all the way up to large browser windows found on computer monitors and wide-screen televisions. This also provides a means of using scaled images that have smaller file sizes for smaller screens, vastly improving page load times.

All users accessing the site on a mobile device will be redirected to the URL m.gumtree.com, and ten percent each of desktop and tablet users will be as well for testing purposes.

“We wanted to develop a site that was mobile first and then work around desktop and tablet users to listen to their feedback to ensure everything works correctly before making it fully available,” said lead designer Melanie Yencken.

Once the testing period is over, all users will access the site via the gumtree.com URL, regardless of the device used. Smartphone apps have already been on the market for a while, but with the addition of a dedicated iPad app users across all devices have the choice of using the responsive website or downloading the app.