Mar
15
2017
Why You Need a Responsive Web Design
If you’re fairly new to web design or Internet marketing, you might not be familiar with the word “responsive.” It’s a concept that’s absolutely vital to your online outreach efforts.
What Is Responsive Web Design?
In a nutshell, responsive web design is a development effort used to ensure that websites maintain a professional and user-friendly appearance across a wide variety of devices. Those devices include laptops, desktops, tablets, smartphones, and phablets.
You might have visited a website on your laptop and found it easy to use. Then, you later visited the same website on your smartphone only to discover that it was too difficult to navigate because visual elements were off the screen and it required excessive scrolling to see everything. That’s an example of a website that is not responsive. That’s not what you want for your site.
Responsive web designers employ a development language known as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to ensure that websites are user-friendly whether they’re viewed on a large screen desktop monitor or a small screen smartphone that’s held in portrait orientation.
Why Is Responsive Web Design Important?
The simple fact of the matter is that responsive web design is no longer an option. A few years back, you might have gotten away with a responsive design as a “nice to have.” That’s no longer the case.
At this point in the Information Age, there are more mobile users than there are desktop users. That trend doesn’t seem to be reversing course.
In fact, some companies are developing websites with a “mobile first” approach. In other words, they’re designing the site specifically so that it looks great on mobile devices, then they’re ensuring that the site is also user-friendly on desktops and laptops.
SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an important part of any online marketing strategy. It’s an effort to ensure that content on a website gets discovered by people who use the search engines to find information related to specific keywords.
If you want to maximize the chances that your SEO efforts will bear fruit, you’ll need a responsive design on your website. That’s because, according to Google, more searches occur on a mobile device than on a desktop device.
So, someone could use a smartphone to search for a specific keyword related to your niche and come across your website in the results. If that person visits your site and finds it user-hostile because it’s not responsive, you’re going to lose that potential customer or contact who will quickly exit and resume searching for another, more responsive website.
Also, your site simply won’t rank well without responsive design. In April of last year, Google announced that it was taking mobile-friendliness into account when it determines the rank for a site. The search engine giant wants mobile device users to receive high-quality results when they’re searching for information based on keywords.
Scalability
Finally, responsive design will ensure greater scalability for future technology. Nobody can predict where technology is headed, but it will certainly continue to evolve as it has in the past. There will be new devices (wearables are already gaining traction), new browsers, and new operating systems. A responsive design maximizes the possibility that a website will be user-friendly on newer platforms.
Wrapping It Up
Whether you’re searching for a WordPress theme, a template, or designing a custom website, ensuring that your site is responsive is imperative. If your site isn’t responsive, you’re going to lose market share to your competitors, and I’m sure that’s not what you want, right?
