Mashable may have said that 2013 Is the Year of Responsive Web Design, but that doesn't mean you're too late to the party. First coined in 2010, Responsive Design gives web designers the flexibility to optimize websites for different devices and window sizes all under a single domain. If you're still unsure how it works, click the Restore Down buttonwhen you are on our website on a desktop computer. Drag the window as narrow as it can be and you will see several layout changes optimized for desktop screens, tablets, and smartphones.

We can't recommend responsive design enough, so here are our top-3 reasons to update your site.

3 Reasons to Implement Responsive Design

1. Mobile just keeps growing.

Every day more people are discovering the convenience of information on-the-go. The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project reported that 68% of adults now connect to the internet with mobile devices like smartphones or tablet computers. Google predicts that mobile searches (85.9 billion) will overtake desktop-based searches (84 billion) in 2015. As mobile adoption keeps increasing, it makes more sense each day to focus on your mobile efforts and optimize your site for future guests.

2. Your guests expect a better user experience.

With the limited real estate you have on a smartphone, it makes perfect sense to provide users different site layouts based off of their screen size. Users don't like to be forced to pinch-zoom a site in order to navigate, and a layout made specifically for smaller devices simplifies their experience and can help them find what they are looking for quickly.

Google agrees...

We recommend using responsive web design because it has many good aspects:

• Using a single URL for a piece of content makes it easier for your users to interact with, share, and link to your content, and a single URL for the content helps Google's algorithms assign the indexing properties for the content.
• No redirection is needed for users to get to the device-optimized view, which reduces loading time. Also, user agent-based redirection is error-prone and can degrade your site's user experience (see "Pitfalls when detecting user agents" section for details).
• It saves resources for both your site and Google's crawlers. For responsive web design pages, any Googlebot user agents needs to crawl your pages once, as opposed to crawling multiple times with different user agents, to retrieve your content. This improvement in crawling efficiency can indirectly help Google index more of the site's contents and keep it appropriately fresh.

3. You'd like to save time, and money too.

It's much easier to create and maintain a single responsive site than it is to create maintain a primary site and a mobile site. With a single responsive site, you can minimize the time spent on SEO, Advertising, Writing, Strategy and more. With effective design users are much more likely to stay on your site longer as well, and can lead to more follow through on your calls-to-action.

Want to learn more?

If you're interested in learning more about responsive designs, or if you're still not convinced we'd love to chat. Contact us today to schedule a call or meeting and we'll get back to you ASAP.

 

Tags: responsive design , seo , user experience

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