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A Look at Why Thinking About Mobile Devices is Crucial

Photo by Mike Licht / Flickr

If you’ve not heard about responsive web design before, you really need to start doing some research. As more people begin to use smartphones and other mobile devices to access the Internet, it’s going to become even more important. We’re going to take a look at this important tool you can use to reach your customers on more devices as well as give you a short look at why you need responsive web design.

What is Responsive Web Design?

Basically, responsive web design refers to designers that use a grid for their design in addition to javascript that determines what type of device a person is using and gives them a different file that is setup to look good with that device – no matter the size of the screen. The best part is that it does all of this automatically. Once it’s setup correctly, there’s no extra work for you to have different designs that look good in different devices.

Benefits of Responsive Website Design

Here’s a look at just a few of the benefits of using responsive web design.

Fluid Web Design – The biggest benefit of responsive website design is the fact that it offers a fluid design. This means that no matter what a person’s image resolution is set to on their monitor, they will see all of your content. Not to mention they’ll be able to see your website on their mobile device clearly.
Save Time and Money – Instead of having to run two websites – one for the desktop Internet and one for mobile devices, you’re only going to have to worry about one website that will look good no matter what device is used to view it. This can save you time and money.
User Friendly – When you use responsive web design, your content is going to be more user friendly. This can do quite a bit to help you grow your audience. When people don’t have to worry about being able to read your content, they’re going to be more likely to check out your website.

What Next?

This is up to you, but it would be a very good idea to investigate more and see what you can do to make sure your website is showing up right on mobile devices – even ones with super small screens. The good news is that there are a lot of tools out there that can help you with this considerably. All you have to do is look around and you’re going to find something – a tool or tutorial – that will show you how to implement responsive web design.

Bio:

Sheila Kurdinger is interested in F&I Services online. She also likes to read about infographics online whenever she has some spare time.

Responsive Web Design can engage your customers more by giving them a friendlier user-interface.

What is responsive/adaptive web design?

Responsive web design (or sometimes referred to as adaptive web design) is the process of making a website that will adapt appropriately to any screen size. From desktop, to tablet, to mobile phone, your website will look and feel appropriate to the device it’s being viewed upon. As screen sizes become smaller, a responsive website re-prioritizes content and modifies its design on the fly to meet the needs of users on any given device, thereby presenting a friendlier user-interface.

Here are 5 reasons to make your website responsive:

Eliminates the need to create a mobile-only website.
It’s optimized for performance on mobile devices.
No need to update your mobile website and your desktop website when it’s all in one!
The user interface experience is better across all devices.
Helps you rank higher on the search engines! Yes, Google prefers responsive sites!

If you are planning to redesign your website I recommend making the upgrade to a responsive one. Unfortunately, redesigning your style-sheets and updating your current websites HTML to become responsive can be as expensive as getting a new website created. It is much more cost effective to make a new website responsive from the start, and that’s why I encourage all new web design clients to make their site adaptive.

Want to see it in action? If you’re on your desktop computer (or laptop) adjust the size of your browser to different sizes and you’ll see the website readjust according to the screen size.
That’s responsive web design in action. I’ll be recreating my main website (reelWebDesign.com) to be fully responsive soon, so keep an eye out. If you’d like a sneak peak to see what it will look like just email me.

By Peter Marino