Responsive Web Design

With more and more devices appearing on the market for going online (figures predict that say mobile/tablet users will over take desktop viewing, if they haven’t already) the need to have your website adaptable is there. Many fixed width sites now look and perform terrible on the smaller screen sizes, and if it’s difficult to use people won’t stay.

“Responsive Web Design (RWD) is a Web design approach aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices (from mobile phones to desktop computer monitors)”

from Wikipedia

After initially experimenting with mobile sites and looking at apps I found that making the site responsive was the best solution (at least for me). With the sheer amount of differing devices and screen sizes having a site that was adaptive rather than restrictive makes sense to me. It doesn’t necessarily have to mean a full rebuild either. Take this site for example, minus a few bugs that may exist, this site was made responsive with a few extra lines of code, with a few bits and pieces moved round. True to say that building a responsive site from the ground up would have been a lot easier than adapting an existing but it is definitely food for thought when it comes to looking at your own site.

Here are three reasons why you should give your website the responsive treatment:

• • 1. Google says so:
    

    Responsive design: serves the same HTML for one URL and uses CSS media queries to determine how the content is rendered on the client side. This removes the possible glitches of user-agent detection and frees users from redirects. This is Google’s recommended configuration.

    If a major player in SEO and site rankings thinks it’s a good idea you can bet that they have measures in place to see if your site is catering for mobile users and is ranking you accordingly.

• • 2. The consumer wants it:
    One site, one experience, navigation is easier, no pinch to zoom. Keep the customer happy and at ease and life will be sweet. If when someone on their dinner break checks your site and are greeted with just the top left section then you can pretty much guarantee that they will hit the back button and go to the next site on the list. Think about it, would you stay and view something that was awkward to look at or would you look for something else that was more suited to your current needs?

• 3. One site to maintain:
  Rather than having 2 or 3 versions to keep all the users happy you only have to keep 1 up to date. This means you won’t get penalised for duplicate content, you save time and money and you won’t be in fear of missing something

In conclusion, if you want a site that is indexed properly, ranked nice and high on your chosen plan, offers the end user a nice easy experience and requires minimal upkeep with only one SEO campaign then you’d best go about making it responsive.