The definition of a responsive web design is to craft the website to provide an optimal viewing experience for your visitors across all devices – i.e. tablet, mobile, desktop to make things easier to read and to reduce the amount of scrolling and resizing required.
All websites built within the last few years should now be built on a responsive framework.
Until this technology was widely available for everyone – many businesses had to have two separate websites built. One for desktop and one for smaller devices.
These days – CMS (Content Management Solutions) like WordPress now include a responsive design as standard. All professional web design and development companies will also discuss this with you during the planning stage of the new website to make you aware of how things would look if a customer viewed your website on another device.
Why is a responsive design important?
There are many reasons why a responsive web design is very important to you, which many businesses are still unaware of at this moment in time. For the purposes of this blog – we focus on two main area’s of importance:
1: Greater Accessibility:
If your website has been built using an older framework which is non responsive then your customers are not being provided with the best experience available.
If the website is being viewed on smaller devices – then the customer must scroll for some time to find the information they need.
Our experience shows that if a customer has to scroll for some time or can’t find the information they require in 3 clicks or less – they will leave the site and find a competitor site that provides what they need.
2: SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) requirement:
As of the past 12 months Google now make it a requirement that the design of your website is responsive otherwise they miss you out of their search engine rankings on small devices.
For those that have took time to build up their SEO and have paid a lot of money would be pretty much disheartened to know that their website is not even being shown after all their hard work.
Those that know how important responsiveness is – will be one step ahead and will be obtaining all the clients you should be getting as they will be seen.
Conclusion:
Responsiveness is now an important factor to be taken into consideration during the design stage of your website. Having this in place from day one will not only place your business website on a strong foot from the beginning, but it will also help you obtain more customers overall. So don’t leave it to chance. Make sure your web design is responsive today by testing it out yourself on your phone and tablet devices to see firsthand the experience of your clients before they do.