Does your website looks good on a desktop but ugly on an iPhone? That's bad, but that's where responsive web design can help. Responsive web design is a new approach that allows us, as designers and developers, to produce websites that literally respond and adapt to the device you’re using.
Google recommend responsive web design as the solution to the mobile screen size problem and they even display whether a page is mobile friendly or not in their search results. Building a responsive website will reap benefits for your search engine optimisation strategy.
Regardless of your industry or the products and services your company offers, user-experience on your website should be of the utmost importance. With responsive design, your audience will always be able to engage seamlessly with your site on each of their devices, at any given time. Mobile and tablet use is becoming more and more prevalent, and to succeed with your online presence, your website should be optimized for those devices and their users.
Your potential customers are not patient enough to spend time finding the products and services they're searching for if your website isn't mobile-friendly. Responsive web design is key, and demand for content consumption on mobile phones and tablets will only continue to increase.
Nowadays more searches than ever are being done on mobile devices and therefore Google understands the importance of a mobile friendly website, so much so, if you website isn’t your going to start to drop.
More information can be found direct at Google Mobile Friendly
A mobile website is a second version of a website that is revealed only when a website is visited through a mobile device. Sensing a mobile browser, a mobile version of a website will appear automatically if a user is attempting to access a site on their phone or tablet. One of the biggest challenges with a mobile website, however, is simply the sheer number of different devices, screen sizes and operating systems available on the market. Since you can’t create a unique website for every device, often a mobile website ends up being difficult to maintain, particular as devices and mobile operating systems evolve.
This is when mobile websites died and responsive websites took over.
A responsive website is a single website that "Responds" to whatever device it's being viewed on, automatically adjusting to fit the screen size of that device. Having a single site makes it easier to maintain and manage content, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) will not only be easier to implement and monitor on the one site, but Google shows a preference for sites that are built responsively.
I'm Matt, a 30 year old freelance website designer from Wiltshire. I take extreme pride in my work with a focus on providing quality, affordability and achieving results. I specialise in working with start ups, small businesses, sole traders and a range of other business types and organisations.