Blog

What is a responsive website?

We’ve all been there.  We have whipped out our smart phone to search for something. We think we have found the perfect web site for what we are looking for.  The site looks like it has the product we were searching for.  Perhaps you were looking for the newest gaming system. You’ve touched on the picture of the system you want only to be directed to something totally different.  The picture you resized on your phone didn’t hold and you ended up touching something else. After a few additional tries you finally have the product on your screen.  After reading the description of the product, you aren’t so sure you were thinking of the same thing as what you’re looking at.  The picture isn’t clear. And there is no pricing information.  Maybe there’s a “help” icon that you can touch for a phone number.  As you search the website for help you realize there is no “help” icon and you’ve just spent 30 minutes searching for something with no results.  You move on to another web site.

To stop this from happening to your business, you need to use responsive web design.  A responsive web design, crafts your web site to give the customer an optimal visual experience.  The customer will be able to read the web site easier and navigate through the site with minimum scrolling and resizing.  Using a mobile device demonstrates the frustration many have with viewing web sites.  When looking at a web site on a mobile device a person is constantly resizing and panning to locate and see the information and images they need.  If you don’t have a responsive web site, you may be losing customers due to frustration.

Responsive web design has been around since 2004 when the first adaptable site layout was demonstrated. There were terms referring to this type of layout being tossed around in 2008 but it wasn’t until 2013 that responsive web design was cost effective to translate a web design from computer to mobile device.  To be competitive in the world today, you need to have this technology.  Mobile devices have taken the place of many people’s computers.  A smart phone is a portable computer.  Shopping can now happen anywhere you are if you have your phone.

Is your website responsive? Don’t lose your customer base by having a non responsive web site.