What Does Responsive Web Design Mean?

The Data

Recently, the time UK adults spend on their handheld devices, surpassed the time they spend on desktop or laptop computers.

With the continued rise in the number of hand-held devices purchased every year, it’s now more important than ever that your website is accessible on as many devices as possible.

What Does Responsive Mean?

Simply put, responsive is optimising your website for a wide variety of devices that can access your website. Primarily mobiles, tablets, laptops, desktops, and in some cases TVs.

Having a responsive website will enable you to give visitors the best possible experience, from whatever device they access it from.

Its core purpose is to optimise the viewing and interaction experience of your site. This includes improving ability to read, navigate, and decrease or even irradiate the need for panning or zooming on a device.

Why is it so Important?

With the continued rise of people using their hand-held devices, this means that the amount of traffic to websites originating from mobile devices is increasing every day. This is also the case for other handheld devices such as tablets.

As this number increases, and people become more and more familiar with using these devices, it’s apparent that your website will need to work on these devices. To enable them to have the same experience they would get on any laptop or desktop too.

Another extremely important reason to have a responsive website, is that it can help improve the ranking of your website on Google when a search is made from a mobile device. This quote was taken from a blog post from Google earlier this year;

“Today’s the day we begin globally rolling out our mobile-friendly update. We’re boosting the ranking of mobile-friendly pages on mobile search results. Now searchers can more easily find high-quality and relevant results. Where text is readable without tapping or zooming, tap targets are spaced appropriately, and the page avoids unplayable content or horizontal scrolling.“

The following points were taken from another one of their blog posts, posted towards the end of 2014. These are factors that help Google tell if your site is mobile friendly:

• Avoids software that is not common on mobile devices, like Flash
• Uses text that is readable without zooming
• Sizes content to the screen so users don’t have to scroll horizontally or zoom
• Places links far enough apart so that the correct one can be easily tapped

As you can see, Google have made it quite clear that they will boost the ranking of mobile friendly websites.

Conclusion

As the number of people using different browsing devices on a daily basis rises, the need for responsive websites is also rising.

If you’ve got project that you’d like to work with us on, let’s get the ball rolling by booking a call or meet up.