If you’ve had an ear to the ground in the past year you’ve probably heard the term “Responsive Web Design” thrown around, but you might not know what it is or what the benefits are for your businesses web site. This post will give you an idea of what Responsive Web Design is and 5 things your business needs to know about responsive web design.
1. What is Responsive Web Design?
To put it simply, Responsive Web Design means a website design that will respond to the screen size of the device that the web site is being viewed on. The web site automatically detects whether you’re viewing it from your iPhone, your tablet, a Laptop or your much larger monitor connected to your computer or even your TV! It will then adjust how the website is displayed so that it is optimized for the exact size of screen you’re viewing it on. No more pinch zooming or squinting at small text on your smart phone or huge amounts of blank space surrounding your website on a monitor.
2. More of your visitors are from Mobile devices than you realize, and the trend is growing
Smart phone usage is rising at an exponential rate with new smart phone and tablet devices now outselling PC’s and Laptops. More and more people are leaving the Laptop behind and using a Tablet or Hybrid at home and on the road. We are already seeing some of our clients with 50% of their traffic coming from the Mobile web.
3. Big Companies are already using Responsive Web Design
Websites like Microsoft and Optus have shown that Responsive Web Design can work for even large scale high complexity web sites and support for Responsive Web Design is growing every day with more and more companies getting their websites mobile ready.
4. Google views Responsive Web Design fondly
Search giant Google is often secretive about its selection process for ranking pages and which sites will be given preference in its search results. There’s a billion dollar SEO industry behind unlocking these secrets but when it comes to Responsive Websites, Google makes it no secret:
We recommend using responsive web design because it has many good aspects:
Using a single URL for a piece of content makes it easier for your users to interact with, share, and link to your content, and a single URL for the content helps Google’s algorithms assign the indexing properties for the content.
Google Developers page
5. You could be the first in your industry
Mobile users that search for a product or service visit a web site and find it not optimized for the Mobile Web will quickly move on to the next and stop at the first responsive website they find. Your business could be the first in your industry to act on the Responsive Web Design trend which could mean lots of people sending their business your way. Don’t miss out on your chance to be the first through the door and you definitely don’t want to be the last.
Still reading? What are you waiting for…
Talk to Web Lab about getting a Responsive Website built for your business.