Stop Driving Away Mobile Users with your Web Design – Make your Site Optimized for All Devices
You don’t need to be a marketing expert to know that mobile web usage is skyrocketing. With mobile media time exceeding that on any other platform while usage overall continues to grow, it goes without saying that we should all be catering to this type of user. Every time someone has the option to choose your site is an opportunity to grow sales, exposure and more. More importantly though is that your competitor is not stealing traffic that may have went to your site all based on your web design. So… What does it mean to have a Responsive Web Design and why should your website use this method of design?
Responsive Web Design – What is it?
Simply defined, a responsive web design is aimed at crafting a site to provide the optimal viewing and interaction experience across a range of devices (desktop, large monitors, mobile phones, tablets, etc.). This includes providing an easy reading view, navigation made simple, quick and intuitive.
Reasons to Create a Responsive Website
At Fuse, we’re huge fans of responsive designs for many reasons, but we understand that technology excites us perhaps more than most people. For that reason, we’re going to focus on 5 reasons that make a responsive web design a no-brainer!
Google Rewards Mobile Friendly Sites
Responsive web design is rewarded by Google in the form of a boost in your rankings on their result pages according to their Webmaster Central Blog. Consequently resulting in lower rankings by not adjusting your site for mobile devices. Even if this were the only reason to move to a responsive site design, it would easily justify the cost from this incentive alone.
Mobile Usage Growth
The growth of mobile devices in the hands of individuals worldwide is no secret. If your target demographic began to shift or a new group of people became interested in your offerings, you’d make sure to get in front of them. You wouldn’t even need to consider it; it’s just how you run your business. If you don’t have a responsive site, then you are missing an incredibly large demographic of people who are interested in what you have to offer. Make sure your website caters to viewers from any device.
Creating the Ideal User Experience
Lets take the same idea from the last point, but consider your own shopping and web usage habits this time. How often are you on your mobile device and you encounter a poor website that frustrates you? If you know this feeling, one of two things probably happens: either you leave that site and try to find something similar in a format that wont make you throw your phone across the room (a competitor), or you simply concede to look it back up after you get home and can use your desktop. If you’ve ever thought of returning to the search when you got home, how often did you forget about it entirely? The opportunity is gone – there’s a good chance that potential customer completely forgot about what they were searching for by the time they got home.
Take the website to the right for example. This is the Art College website at Yale – there is no way anyone on a mobile device is going to browse this unless they’re already a student and have no choice. Making a website that is ideal for any device has never been easier – make sure that every user, regardless of where they are or what device they are using, has the ideal experience.
Development Costs & Analytics
Now that we know the importance of catering to mobile devices, the question of cost begins to come into the picture. The fact of the matter is that by creating a mobile version and a desktop version, you will need to create two websites…that means twice the cost. With responsive web design, you get one website that works on all devices. Rather than the need to create two separate sets of code, the mobile and desktop versions are created at the same time. Which leads to reporting and understanding your web traffic.
With a separate site, you would need to monitor multiple analytic accounts in order to understand how your websites are performing. With responsive designs, you can simply see all of this data from one dashboard with Google Analytics. You will be able to still differentiate between mobile and desktop traffic within the data. Responsive sites quite simply just make the most since when it comes to your web design.
Forward thinking – Future Ready
Still not convinced? If you’re worried about cost then consider this: mobile technology is consistently changing and adapting, from screen sizes, browsers, speeds, and much more. When you have a website that adjusts automatically to the display size of the device, it will not matter what the new screen size is on next years flagship smart phones. Your website will still be catering to their device. With responsive design, you are prepared for future mobile devices. If they still use a web browser, your site will work with little to zero development updates needed.
SEO Benefits to Responsive Websites
Search Engine Optimization is something that should be kept in mind whenever possible – the goal is that when someone searches for a product/service that you offer they find you – and more specifically, not your competitor. Responsive web designs are the ideal web design method to not only improve your rankings with Google, but also simplify the process.
- Boost in Rankings by page for sites that are mobile friendly – Responsive Design is the best at delivering a universal experience.
- Mobile sites and desktop sites require two sets of code, consequently requiring two sites to optimize with SEO strategy – this ultimately requires more time and money for the same results.
- With one site comes one URL. In SEO it is best not to have different sites competing against keywords that would take them to the same page.
- Enhances the user experience, generates more clicks, ultimately providing a higher ranking with search engines leading to more traffic.
- Mobile sites and desktop sites with different content can cause users to back out of your page (bounce rate) and become frustrated with your websites.
- Responsive web design offers faster load times, which is a major factor when it comes to how well your website ranks with search engines.
