Responsive website design was quite the hottest topic around the web community for over two years now. We’ve finally moved past the desktop era and reached the point where companies are realizing that the key to reaching full business growth can come from forging the whole marketing program around a more coherent, integrated whole of these various digital and mobile platforms.

But it’s easier said than done! When you have a website that cannot render well in different devices, or a single version of your digital presence that looks messy on different devices, you know you’ve got a whole bunch of problems.

Many digital marketing experts, web designers and entrepreneurs are convinced that the future belongs to companies who will adopt fast in the changing dynamics of marketing for consumers. Too unfortunate, however, that there are still many companies that are slow to adapt or invest resources into transforming their old and inflexible websites into a much useful responsive website design.

Start considering responsive design for your website now. To learn a few things before planning and budgeting for outsourcing or hiring a reliable web company, this article will provide you with a brief backgrounder to catch up with the times.

What is Responsive Website Design

Before we define responsive design, let’s first give credit to where credit is due: Ethan Marcotte, the foremost creator of this web design trend. Often described as a piece of technological breakthrough, responsive design is also technically a set of techniques and ideas. See, it’s pretty confusing?

In exact terms, what is responsive design? Or a better and more appropriate question to ask is what does responsive website design solve?

To be precise, it’s the vastly-changing web browsers in different devices that offer quite a viewing trouble to anyone who expect to be able to browse the web on their tablet devices just as seamless as they browse the web on a desktop computer.

Not long ago, the response from the web design community came in the form of websites with mobile versions. Least to say, it was pretty reasonable at that time to have a desktop version and a mobile version of a brand’s website until responsive website design enters the picture.

In short and to cut a very long story, the world experienced a hyper-fast evolution of screen sizes and resolutions almost every day that it was no longer practical to come up with a different version of a website that targets each individual device anymore. Responsive website design soon came to address the challenges offered by modern technologies.

Advantages of Responsive Design for Business

1. Increase Audience Reach Among Tablet and Mobile Users.

With the phenomenal rise of web applications on tablet and mobile devices, responsive website design came as a welcome relief. Users would not longer experience being re-directed to a device-specific site but with responsive design, only one site can be developed across devices.

Companies looking to optimize their online content can also expect a lot of benefits from responsive design in view of the expected increase of tablet sales.

2. Increase Sales and Conversion Rates.

With responsive website design, the improved site experience of users will be vastly improved. This can be accounted to factors like the zero redirection process and the unified design that brings a consistent look and feel across different devices.

Thus, consistent user experience – which creates familiarity of navigation and system use across devices that technically removes barriers that multiple sites present – will create positive impact on the conversion rates.

3. Increase Search Engine Visibility.

This is one benefit that small businesses with very limited budget will love. What responsive website design allows is the management of one site with a single set of hypertext links, which in effect reduces the time you’d likely spend maintaining your site.

With more time, you get the chance to focus on link outreach based on a consolidated search engine optimization strategy.

Remember that even Google have once indicated that it favors giving high local search rankings for sites that are mobile optimized. Additional benefit of responsive design include letting you build a unified analytics, web strategy, internet marketing and SEO efforts.

4. Save Time and Cost on Mobile Development.

It takes fewer time to develop a responsive website layout than it would consume developing an altogether stand-alone mobile site.

In addition to the extra more time it takes to follow the traditional approach, creating your mobile site version will have to be subjected to multiple testing, which will obviously result for higher overhead cost for development, support and maintenance.

5. Save Time and Cost on Site Management.

Small businesses with very limited resources will have more time dedicated to their core competencies because maintaining and managing a single site will be far efficient than it would allow you to manage sites for desktop and mobile browsers.

Attached with responsive website design and development, you will be delivered with a single administrative interface with layout and workflow tools that will let you manage content or site templates that are being used for different devices.

So if you are still thinking of clinging to the old ways of developing and managing content for multiple websites, as well as multiple sets of analytics and strategies to develop and deploy, think about how much this will cost you in the long-term.

Why Prioritize Responsive Web Design Now

In sum, responsive website design is made possible by creating an optimized layout regardless of which device it finds itself being loaded in. It helps in simplifying and unifying sites across devices into one site. No more, no less.

There is no denying that responsive web design dwells at a very infant stage. But it’s not fair to quickly judge that it’s just a fad, likely to fail soon. On the contrary responsive design puts you ahead of the trend for your business. The demand for media rich mobile internet and apps will continue to increase and the challenges that these open must be addressed.

For the meantime, responsive website design is here to stay and for businesses to use to stay ahead of the competition and seize market share.