To get Response is the future

To get Response is the future

What is Responsive Web Design?

Responsive Web Design (RWD) is an approach of laying-out and coding a website such that the website provides an optimal viewing experience — ease of reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling — across a wide range of devices (from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones).

The designer creating a Responsive Design should ensure that the website’s navigation elements, screen-layouts, text, images, audio/video players and other UI elements re-adjust themselves on a variety of devices. Thus, one need not spend extra time and money in creating and maintaining one “mobile-site version” and another “desktop-site version” of her website.

“Responsive Web Design is a collection of techniques that allow a website to flex and adapt to the size of screen it’s being viewed on. Someone opening your site on a small smartphone will be shown the same site as the person opening it on their laptop but the site will have noticed the constraints and automatically reformatted to give the user an experience better suited to their device. No more loading a huge website and having to zoom in and out to find the content you're looking for. Responsive web design takes into account interaction too and makes your site easier to use by acknowledging and integrating things like touch screens to aid navigation.”

Why is Responsive Design important for websites?

As more people are beginning to use mobile devices, like smartphones and tablets, for every task that used to be only capable on desktop, one thing has become clear: mobile is taking over Internet surfing. And, it's not even just surfing. It's everything from browsing social media outlets, checking emails and doing some online shopping.

Because mobile Internet usage is increasing steadily, it's extremely important that your website is mobile friendly. Usually this isn't a major concern. You have a website designed for desktop users and another site specifically developed for mobile users. But, is it possible to have a site that is equally favorable for both desktop and mobile users?

There actually is a design that can handle both types of users. And it's called responsive web design.

Time & Money

The notion that making a responsive website is expensive is just that, a notion. The fact is, while the cost to make a responsive website is somewhat more than making a conventional website, but the expenses to duplicate a website for mobile and other devices gets completely eliminated, as a result – that cuts total development costs, significantly. In addition to that, a responsive design cuts the total ownership cost, by means of taking away the effort to maintain different versions of a website i.e. a “desktop-version”, a “mobile-version”.  Thus, in the long term, investing in responsive website design is the smartest decision.

Pervasion of the Mobile Devices

Internet traffic originating from mobile devices is rising exponentially each day. As more and more people get used to browsing the web through their smartphones and tablets, it is foolhardy for any website publisher to ignore responsive web design. The “One Site Fits All Devices” approach soon will be the norm.

User experience

While, content is king and discoverability of content are foremost success metrics; it is the user experience that enables visitors to consume content on any website through the device of their choice and preference, anytime. Thus, responsive web design is about providing the optimal user experience irrespective of whether they use a desktop computer, a smartphone, a tablet or a smart-TV.

Device Agnostic

Responsive Websites are agnostic to devices and their operating systems. A responsive web design ensures that users get the best and consistent experience of a website on any device of the user’s choice and preference – be that the iPhone, the iPad, the smartphones running the Android OS, or the Windows OS and several others. As a result website owners and content publishers can need not exercise the option to build versions of their website for every popular device platform which they expect their audience might be using.

The way ahead

Thus, rather than compartmentalizing website content into disparate, device-specific experiences, it is smarter to adopt the responsive web design approach. That’s not to say there isn’t a business case for separate sites geared toward specific devices; for example, if the user-goals for your mobile content-offering are limited in scope than its desktop equivalent, then serving different content to each might be the best approach.

But that kind of design-thinking does not have to be our default. Now more than ever, digital content is meant to be viewed on a spectrum of different experiences.

I wonder what sort of device you’re reading this on. A laptop? Maybe you’re at your desk reading the words on a cinema-sized display. Or - perhaps even more likely - you’ve got a smartphone in your hand and you’re thumbing through on your way to another meeting.

When you look around at the incredible plethora of devices on the market these days it’s not surprising that current market research shows mobile internet usage is set to grow massively by 2015 with an increase of 16% from 2010. What is perhaps more interesting is that this means the number of mobile internet users will overtake that of desktop users during this time.

Undoubtedly this change in the way people are consuming online information and viewing websites means we need to be considering how we engage with them to offer the best online experience for our brands and services. So what can we do to make this happen?

BACK IN THE DAY…

When mobile phones started to become internet enabled (remember WAP?) people wanted to access certain information on the move. Checking train times, the weather, or keeping up with the footy scores on a standard desktop site meant difficult navigation, large slow downloads big bills and an all-round poor user experience.

Many businesses realised the need to cater for mobile users, and until fairly recently many opted for a separate “mobile” version of their website. You may have notice a few yourself. You know, the ones starting with “m.somethingorother” instead of “www”.

These mobile sites are completely separate from their larger desktop siblings and have reduced functionality and content. This toned down version means users are only able to load and use the very basic of site content and functionality, and ultimately miss out on the information they may be expecting to find. Separate mobile sites come with logistical problems too - two sites equals two things to design, build and manage. That means ongoing cost and time implications and all for a less enjoyable experience for the user. Not a great solution is it?

Another issue with mobile sites is what mobile device do you build them for? There are too many different screen sizes and differing capabilities to do them all so which do you choose? How many would you need?

Well, with Responsive Web Design the answer is easy.

BENEFITS

·         Future proofing. Responsive sites work well across the multitude of existing devices on the market. It’s a safe bet it will for considerable time to come.

·         Better, faster, smarter user experience. Optimizing your site no matter what the user chooses to view it on makes their life easier. Happier customers mean a happier business.

·         Cost Effective. Responsive sites take a little longer to put together, but they survive longer and the unified approach means management, support and upgrades only need be applied to one place. That saves time and money.

·         SEO optimised. Managing SEO for separate mobile and desktop sites is hard and doesn’t produce great results.

·         Improve conversion rates. An optimised and consistent site, no matter what platform it’s viewed on, provides a better experience for the user which is more likely to lead to them engaging with you than going elsewhere.

… And Do You Need One?

1) SOME MORE LIGHTS ON  responsive website?

A responsive website is a site that restructures and reorganizes itself based on the type of device someone is using to view your website (desktop, tablet, mobile phone, etc.).

Quite simply, a responsive site adjusts for different-sized screens.If you have a non-responsive website, your site always appears exactly as it would on a desktop—which is great on a desktop, but not-so-great on a mobile phone.

On a phone’s small screen, your site is teeny tiny, making it very difficult to use. 

View of non-responsive website on a desktop:

View of the same non-responsive website on a mobile phone:

When a site is built responsively, these problems are solved. They display content in user-friendly formats, regardless of the device that’s being used.

But how do I know if our business needs to upgrade to a responsive website?

There are several steps you can take to figure out if responsive design is something you should consider:

1.     Open up your website on a phone. 
Click around to see if you can easily read the text and open links. Is it difficult to use your website? Can you easily see and click on your company’s phone number and have your phone make a call?  Is it easy to fill out and submit any contact forms in the site?

2.   Check out your website analytics. 
Look at the percentage of people who are visiting your website on mobile devices. Is it 10 percent or higher? Are you potentially frustrating (or worse, sending away) 1 out of every 10 of your site’s visitors?

While you’re reviewing your analytics, also make sure to see if this percentage has been trending up over time (six months, one year, and two years). Are you seeing an increasing number of mobile visitors?

3.     Think about your target audience.
Do your target customers actively use mobile devices to look at websites? If your business serves digital moms in their 30s who use their phones to stay connected to the world, that’s the audience that matters—not your company’s employees, not you’re CEO, etc.)

The good news... and the bad news

The good news is your business may not need a responsive website right now—even if you answered “yes” above.

We have clients who we’ve advised to actually stay with their non-responsive websites.

Why?

The reasons vary.

Sometimes, their mobile percentages just don’t justify it. Other times, their target customers just don’t use mobile devices to research their types of businesses. And other times, they have a complex website that would exceptionally costly to change.

Bottom line: Upgrading to a responsive website wouldn’t make the best use of these clients’ time and money.

And that leads me to the bad news: Time and money.

There is typically a significant amount of work that goes into upgrading a non-responsive website into a responsive website. It often means reworking the code of your site from scratch—a time-consuming task—and it’s rarely cheap.

Responsive web design offers the way forward…..