What is Responsive Design?
It’s becoming more important to consider a responsive website design when building any new website. These days more people are moving away from just using conventional desktop PC’s or laptops to access the web, users are now using many different devices to access the web on a daily basis including tablets, smartphones and even handheld gaming devices.
It’s also been predicted that mobile internet usage will overtake desktop usage by 2015, so it would be foolish not to make the most of your website.
Responsive web design is quickly becoming and industry standard and is a concept that blends CSS, CSS3 and JavaScript allowing web designers and developers to make the layout, images and functionality of the website more flexible and fluid across multiple devices.
In a nutshell, responsive design allows a website to adapt to the size of the users browser, whether it be a laptop, desktop tablet or mobile device.
Why You Shouldn’t Ignore Responsive Design
For example, a scenario might be you approach a web design agency to develop your new business website; you give them all the ideas and requirements for your new business website.
Everything is going really well with project, you are then provided design concepts of the new website, they look great and fulfil all your requirement’s which you provided in the project brief, you are happy with what you have been given you feel this will represent your brand well online and help your company generate leads and sales.
This is then signed off and the new website is created. You then later realise that your website doesn’t look good on mobile devices or tablets, and with over 100 million smartphone units sold and mobile internet usage increasing by 183.43% in Europe since 2010, shouldn’t your website be accessible on all these devices?
So what now, what if someone wants to access your website from their iPad while relaxing watching TV, which most of us do these days. Well, you are going to have to either pay more money to have your website upgraded or have a mobile website created for you, or you could look and creating an app either way this is additional costs that you didn’t need to have.
SEO Benefits Of Responsive Design
Search engine optimization offers another great reason to consider responsive web design. Previously, to view a website on a mobile browser you would normally be redirected to an entirely new version of the website that is a mobile compatible.
This would be to accommodate the individual needs of the device that’s being used to access the website; for example, there would be a website for computers, one for tablets, and one for smartphones.
Each of the mobile websites would have their own unique URL, but would use the same content across all the sites. This could also cause problems with duplicate content, something that Google has recently clampdown on.
Google wants their users to be happy and have a positive browsing experience, this one of the reasons why they recommended using responsive web design as this makes it easier for them to crawl and index your websites content as it only needs to crawl the website once, opposed to crawling it multiple times, this also provides users with one URL, reducing loading times and making it easier for users to share, link and interact with your website.
A responsive website design will provide users with the best possible browsing experience while viewing your website. No longer will your business require multiple sites and from an SEO standpoint, Google loves this because there is no need for any redirects to get customers to the right version of the website.