Let’s Talk About Responsive Websites

Hey, you! How old is your website? A year or two? A few years? Several…? Is it responsive? Do you know what a responsive website is? It’s cool, most people don’t—it happens on the back end. But responsive design is becoming increasingly important for new websites, and you should probably make sure yours is. Responsive, that is.

What is responsive design?

Have you ever gone to a website on your phone just to find the text and images ridiculously tiny, so you have to keep pinching and scaling the screen to see what’s on the page? Or you go to read an article and have to keep scrolling to the side to see all the content? Does it make you want to throw your smartphone at the company putting you through such agony? Not only are these issues unbearably irritating, but because they impact user experience, they negatively affect the company’s search result visibility, as well.

Responsive design takes care of that nonsense. It is a way of creating a website so its layout changes fluidly as the screen size changes. Going from desktop to laptop to tablet to smartphone, for instance. (See Google’s pretty graphic below to get an idea of what we mean.)

Why should I care?

This is pretty important for a few reasons. We won’t throw specific statistics at you, because they’ll change again tomorrow. But it’s safe to say, most adults own a smartphone (or three), and well over half of all web traffic comes from said smartphones. Here’s a fun “did you know”: In some countries, the number of smartphones actually exceeds the number of personal computers. If your website isn’t designed to be mobile-friendly (and if it’s a few years old, it probably isn’t), you risk losing those potential clients. Seriously…would you want to do business with someone whose site you can’t even read?

Not only does a responsive design make your website prettier and more user-friendly, it also keeps things consistent across devices and platforms. For a while, it was popular to have a desktop website and a mobile-only site. Two separate websites. Two places to have to make updates. Two URLs where the content may or may not be the same. In fact, often a mobile-only site will have less information or fewer options than the normal site…which means a frustrating time for the user, if they were expecting a similar experience from device to device. Responsive website=one site, one URL, one place to add/subtract/make updates to content…more fun for users, less work for you.

Oh and then there’s Google. We could (and probably will) write a whole article on SEO and search engine optimization. But the very bare bones of it is—Google likes responsive sites. They’re more user-friendly, so they will appear higher in Google search results. In fact, Google places so much importance on responsive sites that, in July 2019, they made mobile-first indexing (using the mobile version of a site to determine search ranking) the default for all new websites. Like it or hate it, Google rules us all.

How can we help?

If you hadn’t already sussed it out, we specialize in responsive web design! We want to make your website pretty and user-friendly across all those devices. Mostly because we also use our phones to browse the web, and your responsive site is one less frustratingly tiny thing we have to strain our eyeballs over. And no need to fret—it’s not as painful (or expensive) as it may seem to get you nice and responsive. Sometimes all it takes is a few tweaks.

(Don’t know if your website is responsive? It’s super easy to find out—take the test here.)

Do you need to upgrade? Call us! Email us! Message us on Facebook! Send us a postcard or a fruit basket (or a puppy)! We’ll be happy to give you a quote.

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