A simple definition of responsive design is creating a website that automatically scales the content and elements of the website to match the screen size it is viewed on, irrespective of the device.
The goal of creating a responsive design website is to ensure an outstanding experience for your visitors. Such a website helps your page visitors to avoid unnecessary scrolling, panning, resizing or zooming. Visitors have a seamless experience this way, which creates a favourable impression of the business or organization.
Integrating responsive design into your website enables you to use it on all platforms and devices without putting in any further effort. In simpler terms, a responsive website design eliminates the need to create a different website for tablets and smartphones.
Since the number of mobile viewers is outnumbering desktop viewers nowadays, responsive website designs should be implemented as a key strategy for businesses. Also, mobile-friendliness is a key ranking factor for search engine algorithms.
Importance of Responsive Web Design
Creating a responsive design website needs expertise in HTML and CSS. The importance of responsive web design becomes clearer when you witness how these tools help you to resize, shrink, widen, enlarge a website automatically. There are a few other important factors to note about responsive web design that encourage and attract the target audience to your website and help in generating leads as well. This is essential in securing a strong customer base. With a visually pleasing and user-friendly website, your business has a competitive edge in the market. Some of these important factors include:
- Responsive images to automatically fit screen and browser size
- CSS max-width property to scale the website page and content 100%, based on requirements
- Responsive text size following browser-size window
Benefits of Responsive Web Design
Living in a multi-screen era, it is important for your businesses to be viewed, marketed and advertised across all devices and platforms. The benefits of responsive web design are immense. It can effectively help you to widen your market reach and enhance brand awareness.
Here are some of the well-known benefits of responsive web design:
- Cost-Effective - It is expensive to maintain separate websites for different devices. Using a responsive web design enables your business to curtail the extra cost spent on mobile web designing. You can simply invest one time for a visually attractive, efficient, user-friendly and lead-generating website across all devices and platforms. So, you get to save some precious bucks.
- Greater Traffic - A responsive design website lends great efficiency to your webpage content. It helps in attracting a larger audience due to its engaging and user-friendly experience. Also, you provide your customers with a great experience on all platforms and devices with a versatile tool at a lower cost. Win-win again!
- Flexible - Want to make changes to your website? It is quicker and easier with responsive design. Since responsive web design eliminates the need for maintaining multiple websites, you can make changes at one place and expect them to be reflected across all platforms. You only have to do this once and it is easy to fix small mistakes on the website. So, this is a great advantage.
- Outstanding User Experience - Happy customers are loyal customers. Providing them with a superior interface experience with your brand on all devices creates a positive impression. A responsive design enhances the customer experience with a brand due to their versatility as well as professional appearance and functionality.
- Faster-Loading Pages - A responsive design website is specially created keeping in mind the short attention span of customers. Such websites are optimized for loading within as less as 2 seconds and ensure easy navigation on all devices. Incorporating a responsive image display and caching ensures smooth webpage loading.
- Easy Monitoring - Maintaining separate websites for different platforms means checking on more than one analytics behind one purpose. With a responsive design, you only have one website to maintain on all devices. This means easy monitoring of all your analytics.
- Consistency of Website - Now, it is undeniable that responsive web design provides consistency of websites on all devices. The audience gets uniform content, visual or text in high resolution. This uniformity of website on all devices gives a competitive edge to businesses because of greater operational efficiency.
With each industry growing congested day by day and the rising number of users, as a business owner you need to put in all effort to make the cut. And a responsive design is one of the best ways to go about it.
