If you don’t have a responsive website design, then chances are your website may not work on mobile devices like tablets and smartphones. The fact is that mobile search will generate more searches than PC searches in the very near future. Your website user experience is not only essential to your customers, it’s important to you, because metrics associated with the experience mobile visitors have on your site WILL impact your SEO rankings—and that ultimately impacts your lead flow and your revenues.
If your website has more than 15% percent mobile visitors, it’s time to seriously consider coding your website responsively.
Website developers have to keep in mind that people who log onto websites via smartphone are more likely to be doing so for brief snippets of text, like contact or location information. Attention spans are also short. Information is expected in few if any clicks.
By contrast, people logging onto your website via PC or desktop computer are most likely in an office at home—not on the go in need of immediate information.
Also, in 2014, there is a strong trend of first looking at a website on a mobile device and then using that experience to determine if they will then visit your site on a PC.
The point is that in the year 2014, most business websites must cater to a variety of mobile platforms, which does make your website developer’s job a little more difficult. However, for the sake of bringing in more business and attracting customers, having a responsive website design is essential.
What is Responsive Design?
A responsive website design is essential in today’s day in age, especially if your audience uses mobile devices. Google Analytics will tell you how many of your website visitors use mobile devices. You do not need to guess!
When a website is responsive, it adjusts based on what platform it is displaying on to display properly in the browser size of that particular device. In other and simpler words, if you look at a website on your desktop computer and check the same website on your smartphone on the train home from work, it should be equally easy to navigate and read. To make a website responsive (credit to http://www.studiopress.com/design/website-respond-mobile-devices.htm), there are a few things you can do, like alter the frame width and font size while targeting specific devices (computer science is involved). This work should only be conducted by a skilled, professional web developer. Adjusting media queries also helps; however, you might not have to tamper with media queries if you initially build the website with a flexible grid approach, which ensures website readjustment from platform to platform without you doing a thing.
Keep in mind that, for example, simply adding a mobile friendly “menu” plugin onto an existing WordPress website is NOT the same as responsive design. Only the menu itself will reformat to be mobile friendly. The rest of your site will not be mobile friendly. Only by coding the entire site to resize and format for mobile devices will enable your prospects and visitors to have a seamless, cross-platform user experience.
For a small business website, this type of coding can usually be done for anywhere between a few hundred dollars and a thousand dollars. It’s best to budget in advance for this and work with your web marketing consultant to determine if it is time to make this move. Good luck!
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