Your experience on a website should be seamless. It should be immersive. It should be satisfying.
You should never wonder why something isn’t working, and you should never have to look for longer than a few seconds to access what you’re after.
Where’s the product I want to buy?
How do I log in to my account?
What’s the phone number for this place?
In a world where time is money – and where time seems to be moving faster than ever before – there just isn’t the patience to stay on a bad website when so many better alternatives exist.
It’s about getting the basics right. Build something with logic that appeals to your visitors and meets their biggest needs. Simple, right?
Well, there’s also the issue of how it looks.
And how it looks to you, right now, may be very different to how it looks to somebody else.
That’s where responsive design comes in.
In the past, businesses catering to the burgeoning smartphone user market used to make multiple versions of a website. One for desktop, another for mobile. This worked to an extent, but it also meant that there were two versions of every piece of content. And if you accidentally followed a link to the mobile version of a website when you were on your laptop, it probably looked pretty bad.
(Think m.facebook.com).
Well, now there’s a better way.
Responsive design is basically a series of technical advancements that make your website – your one and only website – work across multiple devices.
When you visit a page, it gathers information about what device you’re using (a desktop or laptop computer, a tablet or a mobile phone, for instance) and adapts the website to best work on that platform.
It knows whether your phone is in typical portrait orientation or if you’ve rotated it to landscape. It knows if you’re on Chrome, Firefox or Safari. It knows the difference between an iPhone and a Samsung.
Each of these changes loads a page slightly differently. Responsive design makes sure it looks great on all of them.
This is important because more than half of your web traffic is going to come from mobile phones.
Those features that customers are after – the product they want to buy, their account information, your phone number – need to be just as easy to find on a mobile phone as they are on a full desktop site. And they need to be within reach of your thumb.
For your own sake as the owner of a website, mobile-friendly builds are important for another reason: Google, responsible for more than 90% of web searches, preferences websites with a functional mobile-friendly site in their search results.
Furthermore, more than 60% of all searches on Google are performed on a mobile phone, which means the links clicked and the websites visited are also on a mobile phone.
You’d never willingly give up half of your potential client base – that would be madness. Ensuring that your site works across as many devices as possible is key to its success.
