What Does Responsive Web Design Mean?

The Data

In recent events, the amount of time an adult in the UK spends on their hand-held device (smartphones and tablets) actually surpassed the time spent on a desktop or laptop for the first time ever.

Also, 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.

 So, What Does Responsive Mean?

Responsive simply put, is optimising your website for a wide variety of devices that have access to your website. These mainly include mobiles, tablets, laptops, desktops and in some cases even your TV.

Having a responsive website will enable you to give your visitors the best experience they possibly can, from any device they choose to 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 the need or in some cases irradiate completely the need for panning of zooming on your device.

Why Is It So Important?

As previously mentioned, with the continued rise on number of people using their hand-held device, this also means that the amount of traffic to websites originating from mobile devices is increasing more and more each 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.

And the following points were taking from another one of their blog posts that was posted towards the end of 2014 which we have already covered above that help consider your site 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 devices, especially handhelds, on a daily basis – the need for a responsive website is forever increasing.

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