Responsive Website Design

What is Responsive Design?

Responsive web design (RWD) is an approach to web design aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal experience across a wide range of devices, including desktop, tablet and mobile (smartphones). An optimal experience means that your site will be easy to read and navigate – with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling required. A site designed with RWD adapts the layout, styling and function of the site to be appropriate for the device. This is done primarily by using a "responsive framework" such as ZURB Foundation – resulting in fluid, proportion-based grids. Sites are also authored using flexible content items e.g.: images, video.

Why responsive design is critically important

The Google Search Algorithm make mobile friendly websites effectively mandatory if you want your site to rank well in search results.
Globally, smartphone penetration of over 80 percent, with 55% of Internet access is made on a mobile device.
69% of mobile consumers use search in their research / comparison process.
70% of mobile searches lead to action on websites within one hour. That's assuming that the website is mobile-friendly, otherwise 40% will choose another search result.

Why previous strategies are now considered outdated

In the past, site owners often resorted to developing an additional "mobile website". This was a separate version of the primary website, designed specifically for mobile.

Such websites typically had the following characteristics:

They often didn't do a great job of permitting the use of native mobile functions – for example "swipe" gestures.
The two websites were separately developed and maintained, meaning double the workload and expense when any site content needed to be modified.
They were often a very limited version of the primary website content and functionality – resulting in a poor user experience.

The advantages of responsive website design

It adapts to provide an optimal user experience on every device / screen size.
It will help improve your results in search engines like Google.
It’s affordable – less expense to develop and maintain than outdated solutions.
It’s easy to maintain – content edits performed only once.

How does your website compare?

If you can say any of the below statements when viewing your website on a phone or tablet, then you undoubtedly need to consider development of a responsive redesign.

When I view my site on a phone, I need to "pinch and zoom" to read content.
My navigation is impossible to read, much less find.
My site takes too long to load.
My images are tiny and I need to zoom in to see detail.
I have a poor "natural search" ranking in search engines such as Google.

Responsive Websites and Quality

There are a wide range of factors that can affect the usability and quality of the user experience. Online Medical have invested heavily in creating a Responsive Website Design solution that results in fast loading, optimal experiences.

The conclusion

If your company’s website isn’t ready to be viewed on every device possible today and well into the future, you might as well not have a website at all.

You should already be in planning to build (or rebuild) your website to utilise responsive design techniques. If not, you now have the ammunition you need to go to the decision makers and plead your case why your website needs to be responsive if you want to reach your marketing goals.