29 Aug Responsive Web Design The Next Hope or Hype?
Responsive Web Design The Next Hope or Hype?
Ever visit a company website via your mobile only to find that the site is too hard or irritating to navigate? Chances are you gave up on the site and went to the company’s competitor.
Now, imagine similarly driving away your potential and existing customers because your site isn’t made for a mobile era.
To prevent that from happening, consider using Responsive Web Design, which adapts a site’s layout to various device types. Images, button, grids, and text are automatically resized to provide the best user experience.
An increasingly popular approach to addressing mobile traffic is to use a Responsive Web Design methodology. Responsive designs “respond” to or resize and adapt themselves to a wide range of screen resolutions, allowing a common user experience across multiple devices.
This approach has benefits for users, marketers, developers, and the business’s bottom line.
Seamless User Experience
Rather than designing separate sites for the variety of screen resolutions hitting your website, a responsive design can target all of them and deliver a user experience that customers will be familiar with as they change devices.
Users who bookmark a site with an app, like Pocket, Instapaper or Pinboard, will automatically see a similar design later on another device. And, if they share the URL on social media sites, a single URL will benefit both mobile and desktop users.
SEO & PPC Benefits
Google’s help page on “Building Smartphone-Optimized Websites” recommends a responsive web design above other approaches. They suggest that a single URL helps Google assign indexing properties for the content, load time is reduced because no redirection is needed, and it saves resources for your site and Google’s crawlers. These can certainly help your site rank higher in the search results.
Now that Google AdWords has moved everyone to “enhanced campaigns”, targeting of devices does not differentiate between desktop and tablet users. A responsive web design can cater to the tablets with the same landing page as for desktops, making PPC campaign management easier.
Simplified Analytics and Reporting
A single URL for a responsive website means that there is a single set of analytics to examine and report. The consolidated reports can make it easier to analyze conversion paths and funnels to figure out where improvements need to be made.
Common Code Base
As many software developers will tell you, less is better. A responsive web design is implemented with a single set of source code, which means any changes can be made in just one place and seen by all visitors to the site. The simplified development process can reduce the costs and time to update the website.
Higher Conversion Rates
For most us, what really matters is how well our website converts. By using responsive web design to increase the focus on smartphone and tablet users while still addressing desktop users, the overall conversion rate for your site will likely increase. Your share of the mobile pie awaits!