Responsive Business Web Design

Responsive Business Web Design Service

What is responsive?

Today, websites are being consumed on a variety of devices, not just the traditional desktop computer of yesterday. Now, users are visiting websites from their phone, tablet, TV, games console, as well as their laptop and desktop computers. We need to adapt to the change in size and variety of devices that are on the market, and being released every month.

To handle all these devices, the latest technique of Responsive Web Design is being employed more and more, especially over the traditional method of creating a separate desktop site and mobile site. Google has announced that it prefers to see sites work responsively as there is only one single page for all content.

Responsive design is an approach to web page creation that makes use of flexible layouts, flexible images and cascading style sheet media queries.  The goal of responsive design is to build web pages that detect the visitor’s screen size and orientation and change the layout accordingly.

Responsive design is a somewhat retro approach to web site design that solves a lot of design problems caused by the proliferation of new types of mobile devices. Responsive design pages use x and y coordinates on a grid for layout and mathematical percentages for images instead of fixed-width parameters. Using percentages instead of fixed-width parameters and a grid layout creates a more fluid layout that will re-size itself to fit the size of the display.

Media queries, a feature of cascading style sheets (CSS), allow the developer to specify when a certain style takes effect. With CSS2, for example, a media query will serve printer-friendly style sheets if requested. CSS3 has expanded query capabilities that allow style sheets to be targeted to a device’s display and serve a desktop, tablet or smartphone style sheet depending on the query response.

This capacity means that instead of having to build a special mobile version of a website — which often requires writing new code from scratch — developers can simply build multiple style sheets for the same web page and perhaps even associate different images with each of the style sheets. As a result, HTML code can be re-purposed instead of having to be rewritten, which saves considerable development time.

Advantages of Responsive Web Design

SEO Benefits

Search engine optimization offers another great reason to consider responsive web design. Previously, to view a website on a mobile browser you would normally be redirected to an entirely new version of the website that is a mobile compatible.

This would be to accommodate the individual needs of the device that’s being used to access the website; for example, there would be a website for computers, one for tablets, and one for smartphones.

Each of the mobile websites would have their own unique URL, but would use the same content across all the sites. This could also cause problems with duplicate content, something that Google has recently clampdown on.

Google wants their users to be happy and have a positive browsing experience, this one of the reasons why they recommended using responsive web design as this makes it easier for them to crawl and index your websites content as it only needs to crawl the website once, opposed to crawling it multiple times, this also provides users with one URL, reducing loading times and making it easier for users to share, link and interact with your website.

A responsive website design will provide users with the best possible browsing experience while viewing your website. No longer will your business require multiple sites and from an SEO standpoint, Google loves this because there is no need for any redirects to get customers to the right version of the 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.

Cost – To maintain separate device specific websites (e.g. for iPhone, iPad, Desktop) would be more costly than maintaining one single website that’s layout adapts automatically to the device in question.

Users – With a well designed responsive website, your users will be happier to use your website and return again and again, on their alternative devices. If a user can’t use your site efficiently, as it is not set up to work on their device, it’s unlikely they will keep returning.

Competition – As RWD is in it’s early adoption stage, getting a leg up on the competition could gain you extra customers and sales. Your new responsive site could appear ahead of your competitors in Google searches, and nobody will turn that down.

Future Proof – By going responsive, your website will stand a much better chance of standing the test of time online. If you get a site designed today, and don’t refresh the look for another 3 years, even if new devices are anounced in that time, your site should have no problem being displayed in it’s adaptive layout.

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Responsive Business Web Design