We often get asked the following questions by prospective clients:
Why should I make my website a responsive design? How do we do this?
It’s actually hugely important, but to understand why we should first establish what responsive design is.
What Is Responsive Web Design?
Responsive web design is all about creating web pages which look good on any device, from a large screen to a small mobile phone. It’s also often referred to as “making a website mobile-friendly”.
Responsive design uses code to automatically adjust the layout of a page, displaying it in a way that suits the screen/window size. To see it in action, just click and drag to resize your internet browser window while viewing this page. See how the elements move or disappear? That’s responsive design.
Why Is It Important?
Every designer and every website owner wants their users to enjoy the experience while using the website. If you had a website with a lot of elements which looked great on a desktop or laptop screen but didn’t shrink responsively, when you viewed it on a mobile everything would look tiny or squashed.
Similarly, if you had a website designed for a small mobile phone screen which didn’t expand responsively, when viewed on a desktop it would either be stretched, or the website would be very small with lots of empty space around it.
None of these situations make for an enjoyable user experience, and it increases the chance of people leaving the website too soon. This is why responsive design is so important.
The other reason to invest in responsive design is SEO, to try and become listed higher in search engine rankings.
Google have stated that they prefer mobile-friendly websites with responsive design over websites with separate desktop and mobile versions. More importantly, they prioritise mobile page load speed as a key metric when deciding your search ranking.
Organic Internet Search
- Traffic From Google
- Other Traffic
As 94% of organic internet search traffic comes from Google and over half of the internet traffic in the world comes from mobiles, responsive design is a vital part of your online presence.
After reading this, your thoughts may have changed to “I should really make my website a responsive design”. The easiest way to ensure your website is responsive is to speak to experts who do this day in day out. We have extensive experience in this area, and it is a standard consideration in our design and build process.
Just contact us to get a free consultation to see how we can help.