While mobile devices have unquestionably altered our lifestyles (the typical smartphone user checks their device
47 times a day or
17,155 a year!) smartphones have also permanently changed the way we conduct business, making it imperative that we
optimize our businesses for mobile.
In fact, by 2021, over 2.14 billion people across the globe are expected to purchase goods and services on the web
. Clearly
, if your brand’s website is not designed to accommodate mobile and other devices, you're losing out on big opportunities!
The truth is, customers no longer tolerate stores that aren't specifically adapted to their devices. If you can't provide an experience that's
fast, accessible, and simple-to-use, don't expect your visitors to hang around.
In this post, we’ll address a number of reasons why responsive design is more of an indispensable innovation than an impressive feature. We’ll also lead you through key design elements of responsive website design.
But First, What Exactly is Responsive Web Design?
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Simply put, responsive design is a method that allows the same website's design and layout to adjust to the size of the screen used to view it. The objective is to deliver an optimized viewing experience (no panning, zooming or scrolling) for a broad range of devices. If your website looks identical when you view it across multiple devices (phone, tablet, desktop, etc.), except really small and you have to zoom, you don't have a responsive design.
Now that you understand the fundamentals, let’s consider why you should be investing in responsive web design.
Additional Traffic from Smartphones
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In the past, businesses developed two versions of their website - one for desktops and the other for mobile phones. While some businesses still follow this practice, it's simply not practical. Having two unique versions of one website is not only takes a considerable amount of time but it's quite demanding as well.
Because of their portability and convenience, smartphones are instinctively used by the audience today to browse various websites. This has caused a growing viewership from mobile users who take notice of whether the website is mobile-ready or not.
Vast mobile traffic is cause enough for businesses to concentrate on making their website responsive for mobile devices users.
Simple Maintenance and Reduced Cost
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Instead of building and maintaining separate versions of the same website, it is clearly more convenient to maintain a responsive web design both with respect to effort and cost. Though somewhat expensive in the beginning, the decreased expense of maintaining different versions results in a greater benefit in the long term.
Responsive sites are both simple to create and easy to maintain, which makes them a sustainable investment opportunity for businesses.
Seamless User Experience
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Mobile users today require a seamless mobile experience. Unresponsive websites tend to distort the way in which the website shows up on devices like mobile and tablets. The content is all mixed up, images are tiny, and navigating across the website becomes difficult.
Through having a responsive web design, businesses can enhance their users’ experience on mobile devices.
Your mobile audience can encounter a quite manageable and appealing version of the website on their mobile devices.
Seamless user experience is unquestionably one of the greatest benefits of having a responsive website.
Improved SEO Benefits
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Responsive design is Google’s suggested design pattern. Google characterizes ‘time on page’ as a primary indicator of a site’s worth for any particular query and favors websites with
faster page loading times. Responsive web design makes the website much simpler for visitors to read and navigate consequently improving the site’s readability and ultimately, the time spent on it.
Moreover, mobile responsive websites generally load faster than sites that aren't responsive. This guarantees that your content is displayed in a clean and tidy fashion and your website is rewarded by Google with higher search engine rankings.
Mobile responsive design is undeniably the route to earn
SEO benefits.
To measure how well your website presently fairs, try taking Google’s mobile responsive test and see exactly what Google’s search algorithm is searching for.
Techniques for Creating a Responsive Website
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Google’s priority is obvious – responsive design is what it prefers. So, if you’re considering developing a new website or revising your current site, here are several tips you must follow -
Design Wireframe
Preparing a layout prior to diving into the design part will help you design the precise look and feel that you desire. Actually, most designers start by developing a wireframe before switching to the coding part. Design numerous responsive prototypes and test them to ensure that the final design is responsive.
Optimize Images
Images strengthen the visual aesthetic of your website. Therefore, it’s vital for your images to be optimized for the internet. Save images in the proper format – photographic or scenic images as JPG and logos and icons as PNG formats while making sure that the images are optimized for many mobile breakpoints.
Optimize Typography
Typography is pivotal to strong branding, readability, design, and accessibility. Webfonts permit all of the stated above and more: the text is selectable, zoomable, searchable, and high-DPI friendly, supplying uniform and clean text rendering irrespective of the screen size and resolution. Webfonts are essential to sound design, UX, and performance. Optimized fonts, aligned with a sensible strategy for how they are loaded and used on the page, can aid in minimizing the entire page size and enhancing page rendering times.
Provide Simple Navigation
Your website should be simple to navigate across. The desktop version of your website will assuredly have visible links to all the crucial pages. In the mobile versions, however, a superior method is to leave the most noteworthy menu items visible while utilizing the hamburger menu for the remainder of the links.
Make Buttons Easy-To-Click
Screen real-estate for mobile phones is so valuable that you might make the error of keeping your buttons and other call-to-actions so diminutive that it becomes hard for the user to click them. Pay careful attention to the size of the buttons. Make them easily visible by incorporating a variety of colors and shapes. You can also use padding on your button to enlarge the clickable area.
As mentioned above, responsive design is no longer just an impressive feature that will differentiate your website. It has become more of a required innovation that you must embrace immediately.
Your website needs to appear just as good and work correctly on a tablet, desktop, along with a smartphone’s browser. And a responsive web design goes a long way in helping you accomplish this.
Keep in mind, investing in responsive web design will help you in a variety of ways
Enhance reach to consumers on all devices
- Provide a stable user experience which boosts retention
- Reduce downtime and expense of site maintenance
- Improve SEO benefits and assist marketing online
Responsive web design is mobile-friendly and is firmly recommended by Google.
The bottom line is having a responsive website will result in greater more traffic, improved lead generation, additional conversions, and more sales – these are the primary reasons your business should be investing in responsive web design, today!
Let Us Help Develop a Responsive Website For Your Business!
Give us a call today at
647 849 1082 or
visit our website to have our experts design a fully responsive website for your business!
