Go Responsive

Do you remember the last time you visited a website on your mobile device or tablet and had an — ahem — unmoving experience? (Pun intended.) Maybe the site wasn’t responsive. Or perhaps it was really difficult to find what you were looking for. Or, maybe it just loaded really slow.

Think about that. A design that is meant to accommodate a 15” desktop screen gets scrunched into a 4” screen. Text becomes unreadable and navigation buttons become microscopic. This results in a frustrating mobile experience.

61% of visitors will leave your site if it’s not mobile-friendly and go to a competitor’s…

It’s becoming more and more apparent that mobile is an important consideration for marketers as we know our customers are using their mobile devices to research our companies and offerings.  Because whatever the issue you may have had with viewing a bad mobile website, you most likely jumped ship and went to another site.  In fact, according to Google, “61% of visitors will leave your site if it’s not mobile-friendly… and go to a competitor’s whose is. Yikes! So, because we want to be where our target customers are, it’s important for us to up our mobile game.

The first step you need to take?

Make your website responsive.

Websites need to be smarter to adapt to the wide range of devices we use and we call this responsive web design a.k.a. mobile-friendly design. Responsive web design is an approach of laying-out and coding a website with optimal viewing experience (ease of reading, scrolling, and navigation) across a wide range of devices (from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones).

…responsive design automatically reformats your website for all screen sizes so your website visitors can easily interact with your site no matter what device they’re using.

Let’s dive into just a few of the more awesome benefits of going responsive!

• Content is more legible without having to zoom in/out.
• Flexibility to adapt a website to different screens
• You only have to publish content once.
• Optimized content for devices with slower data connections.
• Improves SEO, because the URL structure remains constant for all devices.
• Display specific content – in some cases where content is only relevant to users on a specific device.

What do you think about responsive design? Is it something you’ve already implemented or are you planning to do so soon? Share your thoughts below!