Does Your Website Have a Responsive Web Design?

Have you ever visited a website and noticed that the site content was poorly formatted or off the page? You tried to make the best of it… by scrolling left to right, top to bottom – but the site is just aggravating. Even worse, on mobile devices or a tablet, such as a smartphone or iPad, the site doesn’t show at all.

This is very bad for your customers, as they are most likely going to find another business to service them. But how can we guarantee an exceptional web experience on all electronic devices?

The Solution: Responsive Web Design

There’s a solution to this problem and most major companies have adopted it. It’s called “Responsive Web Design”. Major corporations such as Target, Walt Disney World, Coca-Cola, Sony, Microsoft, Cisco, Starbucks, and many more are using this technology to provide an extraordinary online experience to millions around the world.

Responsive Web Design (RWD) is an approach to web design aimed at providing an optimal viewing and interactive web experience that is easy to read, navigate, and designed to work across a wide range of devices (PC’s, MAC, iPad, iPhone, and all other cell phones).

Websites that are optimized to use the responsive web design technology offer a rich user experience, automatic resizing of site menus, navigation, content, images, and much more. Pages are professionally screen-formatted to display with an astonishing user experience and on every browsing device you own.

While some implementations are more elaborate than others (e.g. loading asynchronous scroll content) no extra add-ins or configurations are required by end-users. Users simply visit a website as normal and one that is responsive-ready is displayed and functional as you would expect on all devices.

If you haven’t implemented a responsive web design on your website already, it is imperative to redesign your website to include it. Not only is this redesign important from a user experience (UX) standpoint in that they are able to easily access all parts of your website and complete the intended sales funnel, but it is now also a part of Google’s search algorithm. Google made the announcement that it would start incorporating mobile-friendliness into their results back in April. So if your website is still not responsive or mobile-friendly, you’re behind the game and could currently be losing customers.

Responsive Web Design for Web Developers and Designers

Responsive Web Design Reduces Web Development Time

Another plus to responsive web design is that is reduces the time it takes for web development maintenance. Web developers encourage sites to be “responsive” because they no longer need to support two code bases. Meaning, two separate sites: one display for general PCs and another for mobile devices.

In simple terms, a responsive web design uses "media queries" to figure out the resolution the device is being served on; and the adjustments appear seamless.

Once a responsive website is deployed, PC and mobile users are served the same site; therefore, reducing the number of sites to maintain and eliminate duplicate programming code.

Why is Responsive Design so Important for Web Designers?

Day by day, the number of devices, platforms, and browsers increase that need to be compatible with your websites. This is a fundamental shift in how we’ll build websites in in the coming years. Developers should reduce their code-bases now by “responsifying” their sites.

Things to consider when implementing a Responsive Web Design:

• The amount of time and money for development on all pages
  
  
• Older browser compatibility and scripts needed to retrofit them
  
  
• Performance - Getting the best user experience by tweaking the required programming code
  
  
• Content - Clean and lightweight content to help with the performance
  
  
• Website vs. Web Application - A web application is a web site that DOES something other than display content to the masses
  
  
• Design & Development Process

Think Differently!

The most important part about responsive design is to stop thinking in terms of “pages” and start thinking of “systems” (the overall web application).

Best Practices:

• Content check
• Start small (mobile first)
• Make it modular
• Always be Optimizing

Tools and Frameworks:

Need a Responsive Design Website? 

You should act now. Many users will only navigate through a website when it’s easy to read, navigate, informative and professional. Sales & Marketing Technologies (SMT) can help with your responsive web development and design as well as a comprehensive marketing strategy to achieve top search engine rankings to get you leads and conversions.

Contact SMT today for a free consultation about your website and current online marketing performance. SMT has a rich set of easy-to-use web management tools for clients to delve into and manage their own websites if that’s what they prefer. Our custom sites are built to be fully responsive for all browsers and the mobile world with many available features.