Responsive Web Design
Responsive Web Design
Responsive web design seems to be a hot topic at the moment. I am sure you have received emails from companies offering to make your website responsive, or provide a new website.
In this article, I want to help you cut through jargon and find out what Responsive Web Design is I will also look at why it is important to your business.
What is Responsive Web Design
Simply put, responsive web design is all about ensuring your website looks good on any device. This is regardless of whether it is a mobile phone, a tablet, a laptop or a traditional computer.
Note that I did not say that your website will look the same on any device. Often, it will look different on the device your customer views your website to what you see on your computer.
You may be viewing your website on a traditional desktop computer with a screen size of around 19” or greater. However, your customer may view your site on a watch! If your site looks the same on a watch and a computer screen, the site would be impossible to read. This is because it would be a smaller version of your site.
Instead, because of responsive web design, your site will display in a single column. This type of adjustment is repeated on millions of different devices ensuring the site looks its best.
Your website, whilst having the same content and colour scheme will have a different layout for each device.
This isn’t achieved by having a different version of your website for each of the devices. This was normal a few years ago. When you had a new website built, you would also receive a version built for mobile phones. The likelihood is it would have a URL similar to this https://m.yourdomain.com.
This has changed with the advent of responsive web design. Instead of having multiple versions of your website for each of the device types available. There are special codes behind the scenes how your website is to look on each of the different devices.
Why Should You Have a Responsive Website?
If your website isn’t built responsively it can look bad on devices other than the one it was built for. Older web design technologies didn’t have the code to ensure your website looked great regardless of the device. Many times we have seen a company or sole trader lose business simply because their website was unusable on a phone or other mobile device.
Statista is a company who constantly gather information about how we use the internet. They produce a report each year about the growth of the internet is viewed on mobile phones.
52% of website traffic was on a mobile phone during 2019 statista.com June 2020
Mobile Traffic is up by 222% in the last seven-years broadbandsearch.net 2020
With the growth of mobile phone use across the world, it is becoming more and more important to ensure your website can be viewed on mobile phones and the design of the website ensures it is easy for mobile internet users to navigate through your site and either make contact with you or buy your products and services directly from their device, regardless what that device is.
Quite often you will see savvy shoppers browsing in a store using their mobile device to check if they can buy the same product online. Your website must be easy to use on their devices to ensure they use your website and not competitors.
The Future
I do not need to get the crystal ball out to predict that more and more people are going to use the internet to make purchases, book events, contact companies etc. they are going to use traditional computers less and less because of responsive web design. This is easy to predict because it is already happening. Just as people have moved away from using traditional phones to mobile phones (many households do not have a landline anymore!) so they want to be able to use the internet wherever they are, this means mobile devices are here to stay and will be used more and more.
Conclusions
People are being freed from being stuck in the spare room to view the internet and do their shopping, more and more they can use the internet on different devices wherever they are. As people are using mobile devices over the traditional desktop computer, you need to ensure your website can meet their needs or they will go to a competitor.
Responsive web design ensures your website will be seen no matter what device is used.
Don’t give your competition your business, check if your website is responsive at https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly. If it passes, congratulations. If it doesn’t contact your web developer. Of course, we can help you too, get in touch now to discuss your new website and ensure you don’t lose customers to your competition!
