What's on our mind.

Why You Should Have a Responsive Website

Websites have come a long way since the birth of the Internet years ago. Before you were barely even able to navigate to what you were looking for without wanting to pull your hair out, not to mention the questionable designs and functionality. Now with increased speeds available from telecommunications providers and better knowledge for design and programming, websites are stronger than we ever could have imagined. These factors have allowed developers to more recently introduce the concept of responsive website design.

In simple terms, a responsive website will automatically resize and change its layout based on a devices screen resolution. This means if you view a website on your computer (large screen resolution), you will view a full large-scale version of the website and if you view a website on a mobile phone (small size resolution), you will view a small-scale version of the website. For example, this website has a responsive layout; you can often tell if a website is responsive by scaling the size of your browser window to see if the content adjusts.

Now why is it important to have a responsive website? Well the biggest answer is the movement towards using devices other than computers to access the Internet. Many people elect to use smaller devices over sitting down at a bulky computer and also, with the emergence of smart phones, people have the ability to access the Internet from essentially anywhere.

With that said, websites that don't respond to varying screen resolutions have significant drawbacks. They are often more difficult to navigate as content is smaller (you are forced to pinch and pull), images can be skewed or outside of the viewport, functionality may or may not be broken, forms are more difficult to complete, and so on. The biggest concern is that if a person has a difficult time or becomes frustrated when trying to access your website and leaves, then you could have potentially lose a client, a user, an interaction, or a sale.

A mobile responsive website can alleviate from these potential problems because it allows the content to be presented within the devices viewport, at a much larger size, and with full functionality. Even the simplest task like retrieving the phone number from the contact page while you are on the go, becomes much easier. Additionally, most people expect the mobile experience to be no different than accessing a website from a computer.

I hope that this has shed some light concerning the concept. It certainly is something that should be questioned before inquiring about your website with a developer moving forward. If you have a website that is not yet responsive because it wasn't offered when you purchased it, no need to worry. Non-responsive websites can be converted with often little effort. Happy browsing.