You have probably heard about “responsive design” coming from a web developer when you are going to hire website design or application services, or even when you are starting to learn web design yourself.
What exactly is responsive design?
Right now, you are reading this blog in your computer, cellphone, or tablet and this is because the way of surfing the Internet is increasingly diversified, and any of those options is possible no matter the size of your screen, you can properly visualize these elements thanks to responsive design. In simple words, those are the sites that, with the same layout, fit to any resolution harmoniously, giving the user the same reading experience, regardless of the device they are accessing from, it’s a single code structure that works in different resolutions.
Why use responsive design on your website?
Every day, millions of people use mobile devices to surf the internet and search for the specific needs they have at any given time, no matter where they are. If what you are offering is within those needs, there is a possibility they’ll find and jump into your website, you have to make your business available to all potential customers, otherwise, the possibility of them leaving your site, due to a bad experience, and going to a competing site, is huge.
This and the following reasons are why you should opt for a responsive site.
Internet access through mobile devices is growing: more than 50% of the population connected to the Internet does so through their mobile devices, thanks to the advance in the development of mobile devices and bandwidth quality.
Improves user experience: according to Google Think Insights, if a user accesses your page through a mobile device and cannot find what they are looking for, there is a 61% chance that they will give up and go to another site. You can try it yourself, if you browse a website and feel that it’s poor in user experience, you don’t think twice about leaving.
Increase your sales: having a customizable app or website for an ecommerce, for example, is one way to increase your sales. If your website it’s not accessible through a mobile device, you just are going to lose a big percentage of clients.
Better dissemination on social networks: as access to social networks via mobile devices becomes increasingly frequent, having a site with responsive design is not just ideal, but necessary. The opportunity for your page to be shared on social networks by those users is much greater if you have a pleasant browsing experience.
Increase page speed: Loading speed, in addition to being a ranking factor for Google, also hurts the user. If the site is slow to load, there is a high probability that the user will close the window and look for what they need elsewhere. A responsive design site is already lighter and optimized for mobile devices and therefore loads faster than a desktop version.
Prepare your website for future devices: One of the biggest advantages of such a design is that it’s made for different resolutions and not for different devices. That is, it does not matter what is the resolution of the screen of the device that your visitor is using, the layout will adapt accordingly.
Keep in mind, while all of this is mostly advantages, the initial development cost is higher than that of a “legacy” website since its technical difficulty is higher.
Responsive design is becoming widespread by leaps and bounds and that has prompted several developers to create frameworks (preconfigured applications) so that adaptative pages do not have to be created from scratch, they make life easier and make the entire creation process much smoother for developers. One of the most widespread is Bootstrap, a framework created by the Twitter development team and open source, widely used by freelance developers. Other examples include:
Zurb: another giant in the responsive design market. Like Bootstrap, it allows you to build websites with relative ease.
HTML5 Boilerplate: this framework or front-end template is perhaps the most popular among top companies such as Google, Microsoft, NASA, Nike, among others.
Materialize CSS: inspired by Google’s Material Design, which allows it to give a very similar appearance to what we can see on Android or on the pages created by Google. It’s not as powerful as Bootstrap but it’s very visually appealing and oriented to responsive web design.
Now that you know everything you need to know about responsive design, what are you waiting to convert your website into an adaptive website and gain a competitive edge?
