Ever visit a website on a mobile device, and find it virtually unreadable because it’s a desktop website and everything is too small to read on your little screen? That is a site that needs responsive design and here’s why marketers need to embrace responsive design for our websites. If you haven’t heard of responsive design before, basically, it is web design that responds to its environment. When you visit a site built with responsive design, the site can determine the size of your screen and adapt the website to fit your screen appropriately. For example, if you’re reading this post on a laptop or desktop, try making the window narrower –see how the Biznology blog automatically changes to accommodate your window size? That smaller version you are seeing is the mobile version of the blog.
Mobile is king now. Did you know that more people have cell phones than have toothbrushes? (That’s either an awful lot of cell phones or not enough toothbrushes!) Clearly, we live in a mobile age right now and we need to be present in the mobile space to tell our brand’s story.
Having a mobile website is very important, but… there are thousands of different mobile devices and thousands of different screen sizes. It’s not feasible to create mobile sites that will look right on all of these screens and even if it were possible, it’s certainly not cost effective.
Enter responsive web design. Just build one website that will work on every device!
Today’s customers expect you to meet them wherever they are and more and more, they are on their mobile devices and not their big laptops or desktops.
You wouldn’t write your website in French if your main customer base primarily spoke English, so why would you make your customers use a desktop website if they are primarily mobile? Having a mobile website is just part of speaking your customers’ language.
Need another reason to consider responsive web design? It can help you with your search engine rankings: part of Google’s page ranking search algorithm is based on user experience and if your customers are using a mobile device to search on Google, it is more likely to show results that offer a good mobile user experience at the top of the search results page.
Consider the following scenario: a potential customer is watching TV and sees an ad for your product. He is intrigued and looks up your website on his phone. Oops! You don’t have a mobile website! His show starts again and he forgets all about you.
You don’t want that to happen. This scenario plays out over and over again today and the losers are those who haven’t kept up with the times and built websites with responsive design.
Responsive web design is the future and it’s here now. Are you keeping up?
