responsive web design

Why Your Website Should Be Mobile-Ready with Responsive Design

March 3, 2014 3:20 pm Leave a Comment

Pop quiz! What web-enabled device are you using when viewing this article?

If you’re not using a desktop PC, you’re definitely browsing with your mobile device, right? Why your website should be mobile-ready is not only important, it’s essential, especially to business.

Research-Backed Evidence

The Web has gone truly global as people are visiting web pages from their laptops, tablets, phones and smart televisions. And maybe, not too soon, even more ways will be invented that would allow for netizens to pay a visit to your web presence.

Right now, we’re seeing wearable devices and the so-called Internet of Things grounding up and slowly making a dent. In the numbers department, we’re already seeing that twenty-percent of all web traffic are accounted to mobile-based consumers.

And there’s no sign that mobile adoption statistics are slowing. Plus, people are growing impatient of websites that give poor mobile experience. Users are more demanding but never forgiving of complicated sites that are also difficult to use.

Today, more than 4,000 different screen sizes of mobile devices saturate the market, which do not yet include computer monitors and TVs. And now it’s a wonder how a site can look good across different platforms.

Thankfully, the emergence of responsive web paved the way for a new way of web browsing. But what is responsive design?

What is a mobile friendly website?

Responsive design is a recent web innovation that has truly improved web viewing because pages are easier to read and navigate. In effect, responsive web is the equivalent to having a mobile-friendly website.

Responsive design has caused quite a ripple and has recently been embraced by some of the world’s leading website brands. Don’t be discouraged if you don’t have the budget scales of the big players because getting responsive design can be affordable.

But how does a website become mobile friendly or responsive? According to its proponents, responsive design enables a website to recognize the device and present it at the correct screen resolution and format for your smartphone or tablet.

There is no magic potion available to deliver a responsive design. It’s through a combination of layout and scaling images and reflowing content that do the trick in switching your site’s responsiveness.

Benefits of Mobile Friendly Site

Of course you need to know the key benefits why certain practices have to be adopted. First, let’s consider why you need to pay attention. Smartphone owners use their devices for a couple of very important reasons.

Among plenty of common reasons, these mobile phone users:

View your website
Send inquiry or email to you
Send text messages to you
Pay you after checkout
Donate funds to you
Access web forms
Telephone you

Anytime, anywhere smartphone owners perform the above-mentioned functions using their handheld devices.

Hence, if you’re mindful of your business or the brand experience you give, it’s a wrong move to simply discount how important these people are.Even say those of your avid audience who view your webpage through traditional platforms like desktop computers or laptops.

Why make your site mobile responsive?

Around 90% of websites built or designed for viewing in desktop and laptops do not work within the viewing screens of smartphones and many tablets.

Unlike personal computers, touch-based devices use fingers to activate a link, not mouse cursor. Websites not optimized for mobile when viewed on these devices also require users to pinch and zoom too much to read a site’s content.

You can just imagine how it felt viewing a whole site that’s intentionally designed for a large screen desktop PC reduced in a 2.5 inch space: text that are too small to read and all link buttons become nearly impossible to select.

The overall experience is not only frustrating for users who’re already used to the environment of mobile. It’s also equally unpleasant and perceived to be dragging the productivity of users.

How to Make Your Site Mobile Friendly?

The first step usually entails understanding how much traffic is coming from mobile devices. Check with your Google Analytics account how many of your users are accessing your webpage through mobile. If data yields a bigger percentage, then don’t tarry long. It’s critical that you consider whether or not you need to right away detour into responsive web for a mobile friendly website.

Here are some lessons to get started on how to make your site mobile friendly.

Responsive Design and Mobile Design Are Different.

Once your planning starts, consider that while responsive design may be making your site mobile-friendly, it’s definitely the panacea to solve all your mobile woes.

The basic idea behind a responsive design is simply to make your website perfectly render or respond to various devices and screen sizes.

Designing to make your website responsive to difference monitor might mean taking drastic steps like stripping your site of its great user-friendly options that will only work for non-mobile options.

Address Site Navigation Early On.

As much as possible, remove navigational dropdowns if it can be possibly be avoided and built a much simpler and cleaner nav. One level navigation and disabled for mobile solutions may quite solve your mobile problem.

Use Grid.

While not a novel idea, using or applying grid to design a mobile friendly website can make a lot of difference to ensure that the layout for your site’s content is proportionally scaled.

If you’re retrofitting an existing desktop-designed website, using a grid system will help you embark on a whole new layout work.

Mind Your Fonts and Font Styling.

It’s not only the layout that should be responsive when designing to make a mobile friendly website. The font type should too. Carefully select font types that respond to multiple devices, especially on smaller smart phones.

Prepare Good Quality and Optimized Images.

Consider the image quality and quantity when designing a mobile friendly website. A website with some very bad images can quickly reduce you to the land of forgetting. Optimize the images with special consideration to the bandwidth limitation of your users’ mobile connections and devices.

Mobile Ready Website Is Here to Stay

So live with it. Mobile isn’t going anywhere and we might be just starting. https://www.bigoutsource.com/blog/website-mobile-ready-with-responsive-design/If you’re keen on seizing the vast opportunities offered by the web, never underestimate what mobile friendly website can do for you.

Hope you get to learn from the insights I shared with you on the importance of mobile friendly website with responsive design. By understanding it fully, you can make your site a lot helpful and user-friendly for your new and avid users.

Why People Think Responsive Website Design is a Good Idea

November 7, 2013 2:24 pm Leave a Comment

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.

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