What is Responsive Web Design?
Not so long ago you knew that your website visitor was using a desktop computer. Today they are more likely to be accessing the site in transit from a mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet. There are now so many viewing options with a wide variety of screen sizes. The problem is that the best page appearance settings for a 24 inch desktop computer screen will not deliver good results on a mobile phone screen. Developing duplicate websites configured for different viewing requirements would be a costly and inefficient response to these challenges. For these reasons responsive web design and development is becoming a standard requirement.
A responsive web developer adjusts the web page size to give the optimum viewing experience for different viewing media. The designers and developers setup the website to be sensitive to the size of the screen from where it is accessed. For example, for a viewer using a large desktop computer screen the website can display text and graphics in a number of columns. If the viewer accesses the site from a four inch screen these columns will be merged into one and the text size adjusted for a more comfortable read. A website that cannot adjust page size to access device needs is no longer a sensible commercial option.
Why is responsive web design so important to a business?
Tight competition for online custom and the fickleness of so many mobile device users pushes the demand for these responsive website design solutions. Once a potential customer arrives at your ecommerce store or website you want to encourage them to stay and make a purchase or contact you. People don’t have the patience to scroll across the screen from left to right to read a product review or locate contact details beyond their limited viewing area. Tablet owners might also want to view the page in landscape or portrait view. If they cannot easily view the page on their device they are likely to leave and look elsewhere. Today you can also find many people who only go online from mobiles and you cannot afford to ignore their needs.
Keeping visitors with different screen sizes happy is sufficient reason by itself to insist on a responsive web design approach, but the search engine operators offer an additional motivation to move in this direction – better SEO. For example, Google has gone from just recommending the responsive web design option to giving such websites preferential treatment. In 2015 Google began to add a “mobile friendly” label to responsive websites in search results displayed on a mobile device screen. Consequently mobile users are far more likely to visit your online store when they are informed that it has a responsive web design.
We only design responsive websites
Recognising the growing significance of website access from mobile devices we have decided that all our web design and development services must be fully responsive. In many cases we start off with the mobile friendly design. To ensure that websites will look their best regardless of the computer or mobile used to access them, we cross-test how our websites display on many different mobile devices and screen sizes. Each website we design or redesign is therefore certain to provide your customers with the best possible viewing experience from giant iMacs, to smartphones and tablets. The gains in online custom growth and customer loyalty are not slow in coming. One recent client said that their responsive website design paid for itself in 2 months!
