Responsive website
- 2. What Is A responsive Website ? Responsive Web design (RWD) is a Web design approach aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices (from mobile phones to desktop computer monitors) A responsive website changes its appearance and layout based on the size of the screen the website is displayed on. Responsive sites can be designed to make the text on the page larger and easier to read on smaller screens. They can also be configured to make the buttons on the phone's screen easier to press. More sophisticated ways of using responsive design on a mobile device include: formatting the website to hide or present entirely different information, radically changing the graphics and colors, or even reducing the site to emphasize just its most important piece.
- 3. what does a responsive website actually do? Responsive site architecture and design provides a fluid layout for your website that automatically changes 'responsively' and renders the optimum website experience to best suit the user’s viewing device smartphones, Tablets, Netbooks, Desktops, even Widescreen TVs. It also allows you to priorities your key calls to action for a reduced screen size. What’s more, providing a single, dynamic version of your website to desktop and mobile visitors makes it search engine friendly. That explains why Google loves responsive website design. In fact, Google have stated that it is their 'recommended configuration' for building smartphone and tabletoptimised websites.
- 4. How Many Potential Customers Could You be Losing? You don’t have to be a master statistician to realise that the trend towards internet access via mobile devices is gathering pace and is already unstoppable. This means that the chances of your website being accessed via a mobile device are increasing every day, so you need to make sure that the visitor experience is a good one. You may only get one chance!
- 5. Why To Use responsive Website? The internet is now an integral part of our lives, and, increasingly, people want access to it, any time, anywhere, any place. Websites are now being viewed on devices with hugely varied screen widths and resolutions, ranging from 320 to over 2500 pixels. You need to know that, whatever the screen, your website content will be delivered to a consistently high standard. If a mobile user has difficulty reading your website, you’ll lose them, perhaps for ever!
- 6. Why To Use Responsive Websites ? Why Does It Matter? Because it’s better, and everyone else is doing it. To illustrate why responsive is better, I’ve taken the stats from an anonymous website that is widely representative of many others. If you use a tool like Google Analytics on your website you can look at these same stats and gauge how urgent the matter is for your company.
- 7. Why To Use Responsive Website? Why Does It Matter? Mobile vs. Desktop. This pie chart on the right shows the percentages for visitors coming using mobile, tablet, and desktop devices for the past 12 months. You can view this pie chart for your own website by first selecting the past 12 months for your date range, and then on the left navigating to Audience > Mobile > Overview in Google Analytics. On the lower right you’ll see a small pie chart button. Push that, and you’ll see a chart like this one. In this case the website receives almost 40% of its traffic from mobile devices (for the purposes of this post I’m going to lump tablets into the “mobile” category). Given that this website is not responsive, nor has a mobile version, that’s a hefty chunk of visitors who are receiving a sub-optimal experience. But wait, it gets better! And by “better” I mean worse
- 8. Why To Use responsive Website? Cost Effective Responsive website design means there is no longer a need to build a separate mobile website in addition to your traditional desktop website. A single website covers all devices, and so development time is significantly reduced. Then think about how many potential customers you might lose through not having a responsive website. Cost effective? You could say it’s a no-brainer.
- 9. Why To Use Responsive Websites We all know that our websites need be easily viewed on cell phones and tablets. With Google essentially coming out and saying they prefer responsive design in lieu of a separate mobile website, I felt it fitting to list the benefits of a responsive website. 1. User Experience Obviously having a design that effectively utilizes the screen size of your visitor’s preferred device is the main benefit. Responsive trumps mobile here in its ability to carry over all of the elements from your website. Pictures, content, and calls-to-action are all adjusted, providing a feature-rich experience a separate mobile website simply cannot replicate. 2. Development Rather than developing multiple websites for multiple devices, responsive design allows you to develop one website. Think about the process of updating multiple sites simply for a page addition. You only have one set of content to update instead of several. 3. Stay Ahead of Your Competition With responsive design still being relatively new and not yet widely adopted, you have the opportunity to stand out from your competition and be on the cutting-edge of design. Statistics indicate users are far more likely to buy from a site that is optimized for mobile devices.
- 10. Why To Use responsive Website? 4. Analytics Analyzing one site is hard enough, let alone multiple sites. With responsive design, you only have one site to look after, regardless of the device your users visit your page with. 5. Consistent Branding Often times when I am redirected to a mobile page, it has a different look and feel than the desktop site. With a responsive design, your site is consistent in appearance and branding, helping to keep your image clear. 6. Conversions When you want your site to convert, responsive design is the way to go. You want as little friction between your user and a call-to-action as possible. When you have a well thought-out website with lead generation in mind, these elements carry over and offer an experience visitors will want to engage with. 7. SEO Today there may not be a lot of weight associated with responsive vs. mobile design, but all indications point to Google starting to favor the former. Responsive design simply offers a better user experience than a separate mobile site, and that is what the SERPS are after. Secondly, they don’t have to index and associate multiple sites with you. It’s one site for all users.
- 11. Why To Use responsive Website? 8.Allow Your Website to Adapt : By reworking your website with responsive design, you give it the capability to adapt to multiple browsing platforms. Rather than building websites according to static dimensions, responsive design involves constructing a page according to proportional parameters that allow it to change its layout based on the user’s device. With so many different smart phones and tablets on the market, it’s important to make sure that your web pages can adapt to multiple viewing platforms. Responsive design provides an elegantly simple solution to this problem. Improve
- 12. Why To Use responsive Website? 9 . Improve Visibility !!! One of the most common problems with mobile browsing is the usability issue. Many people fail to make use of their mobile device’s internet capabilities because so many websites are not optimized for mobile browsing. Pages take too long to load, and their layouts often become jumbled and unreadable on the small screen. Building your site according to responsive design principles makes sure that users on any device will get the same experience on your website. Improve usability and your mobile potential will skyrocket.
- 13. Why To Use Responsive Website ? One Website, Many Devices One of the most appealing aspects of responsive web design is that a responsive website can provide a great user-experience across many devices and screen sizes. This is an important characteristic, since it is impossible to anticipate all the devices and screen sizes searchers will use to access your site. A site that works well regardless of these variables will provide a better and more consistent user-experience than a separate mobile site that is designed for a specific device and screen size. Let’s take the following example. Someone searches for a product on their smartphone during a lunch break at work. They find a site that has the product they’re looking for, and decide to continue researching this product on the same site when they get home. Except, when they get home, they will use their desktop instead of their smartphone. If the site in this example is responsive, this person will have a positive user-experience when transitioning from mobile to desktop because they will view the same site on their desktop as they did on their smartphone. On the other hand, if the site is a dedicated mobile site, this person will become frustrated with the fact that they have to locate the desktop version of the site, and find the product all over again.
- 14. Why To Use Responsive Website Save Time and Money In the past, the only solution for mobile browsing was to create a dedicated mobile website. Many webmasters still subscribe to this idea, but it can be expensive and time consuming. Your web hosting needs will increase, you will have two websites to manage, and your IT expenses can shoot through the roof when you have twice as many pages to troubleshoot on a regular basis. Responsive web design allows you to simplify your needs by having only one website for multiple platforms, thus saving you both time and money.
- 15. Future Is Mobile ?!!! The Future Is Mobile While going responsive can present challenges for website owners and online marketers, I return to my previous point that without a mobile-friendly website your future online is bleak. If you’re not providing a mobile-friendly experience for your customers, they’ll bounce off your website and go to your competitor whose website is easier to use. The future is mobile, as we see people increasingly favoring their mobile devices over desktop computers. Nielsen says that over 60% of all mobile phone owners in the US use a smartphone. A recent study by Walker Sands Digital showed mobile traffic to its client base increasing by 171 since Q3 2011. Statista says that 5 billion people will use mobile phones by 2017. Making your website responsive is a small price to pay to reach all these people. By the way, in case you feel like I’m being a bit preachy, I’m preaching as much to myself as to you–my own firm’s website doesn’t have a responsive site yet. Yeah, yeah, the cobbler’s children have no shoes.
- 16. Conclusion Responsive web design is recommended by Google, it allows one website to provide a great user-experience across many devices and screen sizes, and it also makes managing your SEO strategy easier. For these reasons, responsive web design is the best option for your mobile SEO strategy.