What responsive web design is.

Does this situation sound familiar, you are out, waiting in a line for something, you pull up a link on your phone only to end up emailing it to yourself to look at later on a bigger screen? And later, when come back to your desktop computer you see a lot more important emails to answer immediately and the letter from yourself goes down the list never to be remembered again. But there was something interesting on the website which caught your mind. What if your website was someone’s see-it-later? There is one obvious way not to let this happen, your website must be responsive.

A responsive web design is the same site, same links and same content on every device, the only difference that it will resize and reorganize all elements so that they automatically appear properly formatted for every screen.

Responsive Web Design optimizes websites to different desktops and provides good user experience on desktop computers, smartphones and tablets. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, you may lose traffic, users and eventually customers. Of course, you can always get a mobile version of website, but then you will have to manage two independent pages and refuse some important content on mobile version, which your customer might need. And don’t forget about tablet-users, which version should they see? A responsive website adapts to the screen size regardless of the device being used to access it.

Why you need to go responsive

More and more users tend to read feeds, add likes and buy products on-the-go, switching between different devices. And if the customers aren’t satisfied with the mobile experience they get or can’t find some information, they are more likely to leave the website immediately and find another one.

If you have a blog or any social network page for your business, you might see an increase of mobile traffic on website. Following a link on your account future or current customers will get to your website, which means that you must be mobile-friendly, otherwise you will only get dissatisfaction and customers loss. 

SEO

For most companies SEO is an integral part of your marketing strategy, having a responsive website is becoming essential. Having two versions of website, desktop one and mobile one, you get two URLs, example.com and mobile.example.com or m.example.com, so the traffic is divided between these two pages. A responsive website has only one URL, and all direct links lead to one site. It makes easier for Google to crawl your site and reduces a chance of SEO errors. 

Future devices

Responsive design does not adapt to the device being used but to the screen size of the device, it means that no matter with what device someone is viewing your website, template will display properly and will look beautiful. Hundreds of new devices appear on the market every year, so this issue becomes very important.

Caring about future users now will save you time and money in the future when the variety if screen sizes increases even more.