Imagine you’re on a train headed to Toronto and you’re in the mood for some coffee. You heard there’s a great place on Bay St. called “Dante’s Coffee” from a friend, so you decide to look their menu up on your smartphone.
You hit their website, and bam!
- The words are way too small and you can’t read them
- The pictures are cut off because they’re too big
- You end up having to pinch and zoom around your screen to find their Menu
- You can’t find the Menu page because you’re tired of scrolling endlessly to find it – you become frustrated, leave the website, and find another coffee shop’s website where you can actually read what’s on the screen
Unfortunately, Dante’s Coffee is not the only website online that loses business due to having a website that isn’t optimized for smartphones and tablets, resulting in frustrated customers.
So – how do you solve this? How do you make your website work beautifully and fluidly on all devices?
Responsive Design.
When we get down to the utmost basic form, Responsive Design means having your website fluidly adapt to any kind of device you’re using (for example, your smart phone). This is extremely important because a large chunk of users not only own a smartphone – most of them use it to browse the web, too. And in the case of Dante’s Coffee’s website, there is a harsh reality of losing potential customers because a website isn’t easy for people to navigate through.
Let’s go through some of the benefits of having your website become responsive:
Increased Sales & Conversion Rates
With having your website function fluidly across all devices, this leads to an extremely well-balanced user experience. When people go on a website and find what they want in a matter of minutes (or even seconds), this not only leads to a satisfied consumer, but also a potential returning consumer as well.
Increased Visibility With Search Engines
It is now a known fact that Google favours websites that are mobile and tablet-friendly. By favouring your website, Google will make an effort to boost your search engine rankings.
Increased Reach to Mobile / Tablet-Ready Audiences
Smartphones and Tablets are extremely popular devices and moving forward into 2015, they show absolutely zero sign of slowing down. Your website needs to adapt and work fluidly on these devices, or else your business will be left behind. If your user experience on these devices is poor, your website traffic will plummet.
Cost Effective
Some companies take the direction of keeping your current (old) website in tact, while developing two other separate websites that are mobile and tablet-ready. This not only doubles the workload, but also doubles the cost. Responsive websites are built in a way where they are coded for smartphone and tablet views (both landscape and portrait). It’s like paying for four separate websites at the price of one.
To conclude, Responsive Design is here to stay. It gives your website and business incredible value in the ways of increased conversions, increased visibility within search engines, increased reach to different audiences and most of all, is cost effective.