Saturday, May 4, 2013

How a Responsive Website can Help Your Business

By Clea Spahn


An ever increasing way that people are accessing the web today, is from mobile devices like netbooks, tablets, and of course cellular and smartphones. Many mobile devices until very recently were not able to read websites that were made to be viewed on a PC, as they were designed for Firefox, Chrome, or IE, and responsive design changed all that.

Today, however, mobile web access is not only possible, but also easy and stress free for sites that use responsive web designs. These designs have adjustable layouts and scalable images that can adapt to any type of mobile device settings. With a responsive website design, companies can expand the reach of their businesses and websites to targeted traffic.

Responsive web design aims to provide an optimal user experience across a wide range of web-accessing devices. Architects created this idea by investigating how they can make a structure adapt or expand when people are utilizing them, it's where the term "responsive architecture" came from. In the context of the worldwide web, this can include selectively showing or hiding elements and altering the size and position of text or images to enhance a web page's navigation. Websites can then be easily experienced on tiny handhelds or big screens with a minimum of resizing, panning and scrolling.

Numerous beneficial elements are included when responsive web design is chosen. People who visit your site are possible customers, and you should make it easy for them by not asking them to click separate URLs in order to see it on their device. You need a website for each of the URLs. If you have one site for regular web users and one for mobile, you may be dividing links between the two sites, which could impact the link equity of your website.

Multiple sites mean that you must do more work to maintain and develop elements to bring your services and content to your customers, this is much more time and resource intensive than having a single responsive website design. The same applies to analytics and strategy development and deployment. A responsive website means there is only one set of analytics to examine and a single strategy to develop and deploy.

In order to maximize your SEO results, responsive web design makes the process the most beneficial and gets rid of the headaches involved in multiple URLs. Responsive websites are shown to rank higher in Google's search page results. As we all are aware, traffic to your website is dependent on aligning with Google's specifications. Working in a way that aligns with Google's design is incredibly important, even just as important as satisfying customers.

One thing to really consider is that users want a full website experience, regardless of the device that they are using to browse. No one wants to be only shown what the site designer thinks you care about, customers want full control.

Content should always be seen by a potential or returning customer, and a responsive website will make sure this will happen. Many times, someone will find a product or service on a website at work or home on their PC, and then will continue to shop for services or products later in the day on their mobile device, so make sure this is easy for them.




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