Over the past year, responsive design has become quite the hot topic in the web design community. It is covered extensively on several websites and blogs. In this article, we take a look at what response web design means and what are its implications for your business.

The term responsive web design was first coined by Ethan Marcotte in an article published on the popular web design blog A List Apart.

Due to its relevance and importance for businesses, responsive web design is not just a hot topic of discussion anymore but has become standard practice in business web design.

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What is Responsive Web Design?

Responsive web design is a new approach of designing a website. It focuses on providing optimal viewing experience of a website on a wide range of devices, from desktop computers to PDA’s, tablets and smart phones. It is an essential characteristic of a professional website.

A responsive website is easy to read and navigate across all devices with minimum resizing, scrolling or other device specific adjustments required from the end user. In short, it makes a website accessible to users on all platforms.

A responsive website does not necessarily mean that all website elements will appear identical on all devices. Minor adjustments are necessary based on device restrictions such as screen size and technology supported by respective devices. Responsive web design ensures the design is scaled and adjusted automatically without any action on part of the end user. This creates a seamless browsing experience for the user irrespective of the device used to access the website.

What Problem Does Responsive Web design Solve?

How we access the Internet is changing. In addition to desktop browsers, an increasing number of users are now accessing the Internet on tablets, smart phones and other hand-held devices. Price Waterhouse Coopers have predicted that mobile Internet use will surpass desktop use within the next five years.

This has made it essential for businesses to provide users with a seamless experience whether they browse the company’s website on a desktop or a mobile phone.

Furthermore, the expectations of consumers have also changed over time. Today, users expect to be able to browse the web on their phones just as easily as they do on a regular desktop computer. Responsive web design allows businesses to meet this expectation and avoid disappointment.

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Benefits for Business:

Responsive web design has become essential for any business, however small or large the business. It offers several benefits for businesses. These include:

Attract More Consumers

Today, a significant share of website traffic comes from mobile devices. Responsive web design is a great way to tap into this growing audience and find new customers for your business.

Capitlise on The Mobile Internet Boom

Mobile Internet use is growing exponentially. Responsive website design allows your business to capitalise on the mobile Internet boom by making sure your company’s website is easily available to mobile internet users.

Better Usability

Responsive web design ensures optimum usability across all platforms and provides a seamless user experience.

Competitive Advantage

A recent study has found that nearly 2/3rd of businesses have not got around to making sure their website is accessible seamless access on mobile phones. Creating a responsive website for your business thus offers an easy way to stay ahead and beat your competition.

Increased Conversions

A better user experience across all devices encourage users to take action, leading to better conversions.

Cost Effective

It far more cost effective to design a responsive website that can scale automatically to fit all screen resolutions of all devices as opposed to designing a separate template for each device.

Conclusion:

The spectrum of screen sizes and resolutions is widening every day, and creating a different version of a website that targets each individual device is not a practical way forward. This is the problem that responsive web design addresses head on.

Before responsive web design became a common practice, businesses focuses on (some still do today) creating different versions of their website to target different devices. Responsive web design allows for a single design template that automatically scales to fit different devices and platforms without the need for separate templates.

How to Find Out If Your Website is Responsive?

The true test of responsive web design is to access your website on different platforms to test the ease with which the design adapts to different platforms and screen size resolutions. However there is another simple method to perform a quick test for responsive web design. This is explained below.

To see a responsive design in action, open a website on your normal desktop or notebook browser and adjust the browser size by slowly reducing and increasing the edges. A responsive web design should adjust the layout automatically to fit the new browser width, even when you shrink the browser window enough to match the approximate size and resolution of a mobile phone.

Conclusion:

Responsive web design is very important for businesses. It is important to note that responsive web design is different to creating separate templates for each device. It typically involves a single design that scales automatically to fit different devices.

What About You?

Are you taking advantage of responsive web design for your business? You can perform the simple test described above to check if your design is responsive. Please share your response by leaving a comment below.