Why should my business have a responsive web design?
Responsive web design has become the go-to solution for businesses that want a user-friendly interface and higher customer retention. If your company has come this far without taking advantage of all its benefits, you may have already begun to see lower visitor numbers and a disappointing conversion rate.
Work Reveal
As a responsible business owner, you’ll probably need convincing before paying to upgrade your web presence to one that includes responsive design. However, by opting in, you’ll soon see a return on investment that will make it worthwhile. In a nutshell, responsive design is just better than what has gone before, and to keep up with the competition, you’ll need it, too.
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Responsive web design is crucial for most businesses because it allows users to achieve their goals quickly and smoothly. The important elements of your website can be pulled up on a smartphone and appear as a fully functional version of the original, complete with all the utility you’d offer customers on a laptop or desktop computer. If you fail to provide visitors with a mobile-friendly experience like this, they won’t hang around; they’ll click away and complete the action or purchase on a rival site.
Unhappy customers are not good for business, and neither is going up against a major search engine. Google has recently confirmed what many insiders have suspected for some time – sites optimized for multiple users will slip down their search rankings. Google bases its rankings on how useful a page is for the query a user has entered, plus the site’s utility – for example, can a user complete the action they would like to?
Your page may be completely relevant to their search. Still, if visitors cannot access the content easily across several devices, your site may receive less-than-positive reviews and lower search results. If your company is reduced to a second or third-page entry, you’ll lose considerable traffic, as people naturally select links from the first page.
Google has also pointed out that companies with a single responsive website – rather than one standard and one mobile version – are far easier for their bots to discover because there is just one URL.
Suppose your site is responsive and ready to service mobile customers. In that case, you can use many tools and helpful apps, like the click-to-call button, which enables a web user to call your company immediately. Potential customers can also read reviews about your business or even find you in a busy place using Google Maps, both keenly relevant to mobile users’ needs.
Branding is one way we build a relationship of trust with a customer and keep them coming for more of the same. This is pertinent to responsive design for two reasons. Firstly, people do not feel confident in a site they cannot easily navigate. Second, to create a uniform brand, you’ll need responsive design to produce a consistent web appearance so your clients reach you.
There are only a handful of reasons why a company may choose to stick with static design on its web page in today’s market. These include those who do not rely significantly on web traffic to drive sales, those who have few competitors, or those who have already looked into responsive design and found it is not right for them. If you want to stay ahead of the curve for everyone else, responsive design is the only way forward for your website.
Responsive web design features
Until recently, web designers created different pages depending on where they would be viewed; for example, a tablet has a different screen resolution than a laptop, so the content would be optimized for viewing on that particular device.
However, responsive web design has revolutionized how users view the internet. This created an across-the-board experience, allowing us to view pages on a PC, smartphone, or notebook in the same way. When they build a site, designers use the same coding on any resolution, giving every device the same degree of functionality.
Responsive web designers believe that their clients’ web pages should be accessible to every visitor, giving them an optimal experience, regardless of their device. This intelligent response to a web user’s actions keeps your company relevant in an ever-changing online marketplace; it boosts your e-commerce figures and makes visiting your site enjoyable.
Responsive web design has three key features; the secret ingredient is generally considered media queries. These are filters added to CSS or Cascading Style Sheets that affect any individual page’s look and feel. CSS is a handy tool for web designers, but tagging on a media query adaption makes tesizing, rendering, and orienting a page easier.
Another linchpin of responsive design is the flexible layout. This is based on a grid formation, ideal for formatting margins, positioning the key elements of a page, and spacing just right. This means a designer is not limited to a certain number of columns; they can choose as many or as few as is appropriate for the page. A flexible layout also removes the need to work out the layouts and text size based on pixels.
Instead, designers use percentages to adopt a far more fluid approach to producing each page. Pixels work well in photographic images but are a clumsy tool for several devices. One pixel may be expressed as three dots on the phone but ten dots on a desktop, considerably changing an image’s quality between devices.
The third component of responsive design involves using CSS or a dynamic resizing function to create flexible images, videos, and other content. Text can flow relatively easily as the containing area resizes, but web designers need different techniques to spread this across more complex segments; dynamic resizing gives a web designer greater control over how a page behaves and enables them to add or remove components as required.
Taken as a whole, these multiple technologies mean visitors can enjoy the feeling of familiarity, regardless of what device they happen to be using or will be using in the future.
When a mobile user changes from landscape to portrait mode, the intuitive design ensures the page gets bigger or smaller. Furthermore, each element, such as an image, textbox, or video, will also resize to correspond with the different dimensions.
Have you ever tried to access a website and discovered that it was almost impossible to navigate around without shrinking and enlarging the text or buttons? In that case, you’ll understand why responsive design is considered good practice for most website owners.
Responsive web design Vs. Mobile web design
Mobile web design was considered far more relevant to modern consumers than its responsive counterpart. This approach sees designers using smartphones as a starting point and upgrading the technology progressively, through to notepads, desktop computers, and beyond. This method meant companies needed two websites, one for their mobile pages and one for PC users.
In the early golden years of mobile web design, there were several reasons why experts thought that web applications should always be designed first for use on a mobile device. Most important of these was the prevalence of smartphones, and their popularity was continuing to skyrocket. By creating a platform that favored these millions of users, companies could promote their service or product to what was seen as the next generation of computing consumers.
Secondly, mobile design was said to foster a cleaner concept without room for extraneous elements or unnecessary page clutter. On a screen the size of a mobile phone, there is not enough room to crowbar in extra buttons and widgets —instead, a design team had to focus on what was needed. By giving users a clear route to what they want, it was assumed that their experience would be better and faster, leaving them more inclined to return or convert them into paying customers.
Mobile applications were thought to have far more utility than PC-based software; what users expected from their laptops paled compared to the capabilities offered on smartphones. From a digital compass to gyroscopic effects, touch screen inputs, and voice control, designers hoped to build on these tools to produce a modern web design that was not limited by a PC’s constraints.
Although there are pros and cons to adopting a mobile site that runs parallel to the main site, responsively designed pages are ideal for retailers who want a robust, homogenous website with plenty of utility for every user. A single site also simplifies marketing campaigns; there is only a need to manage one site and one SEO strategy. Therefore, a website that features responsive design can save companies time and money and provide a seamless, convenient way for customers to shop.
Responsive web design statistics
When a team of designers builds you a responsive website, you know it will adapt intuitively to whatever device you access it from, but where is the evidence that proves this is a factor in commercial success?
The content marketing company Brand Point found that over 90% of consumers’ buying decisions are affected by visual elements. In other words, if people land on your site and like the look of the place, they are more likely to stay and buy.
Screen resolutions change constantly as new devices reach the market. Web developers Spiderweb found that in 2010, there were just 97 unique screen resolution sizes, but by 2013, that figure had leaped to 232. The only way oto tackle this increase is to have a responsive website optimized for every customer, whatever device they favor.
Customers are driven away by high wait times and pages that take too long to appear; even wn 2009, 47% of people expected a load time of just two seconds on a webpage. In a study carried out by cloud service provider Akamai, it was also found that 40% of web users clicked away if they had not gained access to a page within 3 seconds. That is a pretty slim window of opportunity, and it’s fair to assume that people’s expectations have increased since this study was compiled.
Although external factors like a lack of Wi-Fi or 4G can also affect wait times, the importance of business sites’ speed cannot be underestimated. Web designers can write code for your responsive site that makes it selectively load the elements needed or even bring in graphics at a later stage.
Design matters because it can greatly impact the number of new visitors to your pages; these are people who have reached you by typing in specific search criteria and clicked on the link to your site. Web designers Domain7ave reported that their client Regent CoCollege’s unique visitors leaped 99%fter a revamp of their responsive web design.
If your mobile pages leave an unpleasant taste in your visitors’ mouths, they are far less likely to view your entire organization favorably and tell their friends. Industry experts at the Search Engine Journal discovered that 57% of people would never recommend a company with poorly designed pages, strengthening the case for a consistent web strategy that performs the way your customers want it to—wherever they happen to be.
