Responsive Web Design (RWD) is a web development approach that creates dynamic changes to the appearance of a website, depending on the screen size and orientation of the device being used to view it. RWD is one approach to the problem of designing for the multitude of devices available to customers, ranging from tiny phones to huge desktop monitors. Responsive Website Design uses the so-called ‘breakpoints’ to determine how the layout of a site will appear: one design is used above a breakpoint and another design is applied below that breakpoint. The breakpoints are commonly based on the width of the browser.
And rather than creating a separate site and corresponding codebase for wide-screen monitors, desktops, laptops, tablets, and phones of all sizes, a single codebase can support users with differently sized viewports.
Why should you invest in responsive web design?
It offers optimal experience for the user across the board, responsive web design means your user can read and navigate the site with minimum resizing and scrolling. Having a responsive web design, businesses can improve their users’ experience on mobile devices. Your mobile audience can enjoy a rather manageable and attractive version of the website on their mobile devices.
According to a survey made by “pew research center” in May 2017, many businesses are investing in responsive design already, it showed that about six-in-ten U.S. adults (58%) get news on a mobile device, while only 39% get their news on a desktop or laptop computer. Moreover, in April 2018 Google announced a mobile-first index. These are facts which demonstrate how mobile ownership has blossomed greatly recently, outpacing both combined desktops and laptops. This simply means that all businesses that start increasing their mobile presence will surely drive more traffic to their sites and as a result initiate long-term growth that is due to responsive design of their website.
For more better understanding why you should invest in a Responsive Website Design, here are the reasons:
- Cost Effectiveness
When web developers first started making websites that render well on smaller devices like smartphones and tablets, the popular solution was to develop multiple versions of a website each designed to render well on a specific screen size. The users would then be redirected to the appropriate version based on their screen size. Maintaining multiple websites like this can be time consuming and expensive. Responsive design requires that you maintain only one version of a site. The web server changes the layout as needed for the remaining screen sizes by first sensing what the device is that is being used to view the site. That being said, Responsive Design is cost effective since it manages, supports, and upgrades in a single place saving time and money. It avoids the confusions of developing a separate site for the web and mobile.
Responsive design helps you connect with your audience, regardless of the device they use to view your website. It achieves this goal while being search engine friendly and cost effective.
- Flexibility
The responsive design development allows to view the same content across multiple devices by adhering to certain flexibility in displaying. The contents can move freely on the screen for different resolutions where both the grids and images are fluid. The content gets filled in the allotted space while it also retains the appearance uniformly.
And by this flexibility of Responsive Design, photos and other media that is in your site can adapt and load differently based on what device the user has. This is achieved by using CSS overflow or scaling. This flexibility allows images to shrink or expand dynamically so that they fit appropriately into their containers.
- Improved User Experience
Building a Responsive Website that is optimized for mobile devices means getting more visitors, having fast loading pages with all included images and videos, and cutting more expenses, as no additional versions of the site will be created for mobile phones. User experience that Responsive Design offer to the end users is that they could view the contents across devices which makes their life easier. Customers will never note the difference in service between different platforms and it also maximizes the Users Experience and increases their confidence in the site, it also prevents from creating duplicate content while simplifying the SEO-optimization process.
- Search Engine Optimization Gains
The responsive web design manages SEO optimization uniformly across web and mobile platforms with responsive approach. It is worthwhile to note that Google prefers responsive web design since it is easy for crawling, indexing, and organizing content. SEO benefits in Responsive Design in terms of:
Faster Page Speed – Page loading times are an established and known ranking factor. Every website should be optimized to load as quickly as possible to help the odds of it ranking well in search engine results.
Less Duplicate Content – As intelligent as Google’s algorithms are, it still requires direction from you on which of your website’s content is most important and as the Responsive Design main idea is to make your website to no more duplicates.
Decreased Bounce Rate – Bounce rate is related to time on site. How quickly do your visitors backtrack or leave your website. In responsive design it enables you to not only put up relevant content for use but also display it in a way that is mobile device friendly. It provides a clean, crisp and undistracted environment for users to browse your website.
- Ease of Management
Creative elements are important when designing a website, but usability is essential. It won’t matter how nice looking a website is if visitors are not able to use the site effectively. Beginning with the lowest common denominator most often smartphones, functionality is added to the user experience as the layout capabilities of each device increase.
Is Responsive Design Overrated?
It is overrated in some ways, but as like other marketing strategies and website design. Responsive Design is no exception, since ranking your website path is flawed. There will be always disadvantages for them in different circumstances and speaking of ‘Responsive Design’ here are few flaws of it including:
- Layout of website determines the readability
- There are some instances that you will run into problems with resized advertisements or banner ads
- You might want to let experts do your responsive website, since it is hard to create a responsive website on your own that is fit and accurate to your brand.
- It’s a risk especially, if the website fails in communicating with the audiences or the technical performances lowers down, the website will not be able to achieve success.
Responsive design is a tool, not a cure-all. While using responsive design has many perks when designing across devices, using the technique does not ensure a usable experience. But remember that these flaws are not only applied in responsive design but to every kind of design. At some point the overall responsive website statistics is that it can reinforce ideas that are best suited for audiences’ approach.
Conclusion
Responsive design is one development across multiple devices. It targets the width of the browser and displays the content accordingly on phones, tablets, and desktops. It is a double-edged sword which can be bad and good depending on the brand and ideas you will be working on. But the main idea for responsive design is to fully adjust websites on different platforms with the many benefits of it, like your website SEO and its flexibility.
Nevertheless, devices nowadays have the capabilities to continue to evolve and expand, responsive websites are capable of adapting to new capabilities with ease. Additional display dimensions can be added increasing the longevity of the website. With little investments, the site you have can be made to responsive design which may lead to increased sales conversion on the site with its user-friendly nature and uniformity in displaying contents across different devices.
In addition to overall ease of use for the end-user, search engines have identified the value of responsive web design as well. Citing the ease of a single URL for both desktop and mobile users, both Bing and Google mention responsive website design as the preferred method of providing an experience for users.
But in all, this technique does not ensure a usable experience, ‘just like using a gourmet recipe does not ensure the creation of a magnificent meal.’ The teams must know and focus on the details of content, design, and performance in order to support users across all devices.
Wanting to invest in responsive design? You are much welcome to contact the design team here at Web Developer Philippines. Learn more about designing and web development for different services along with its benefits for your business.
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