Go mobile or go home!
The days when people went home or visited an internet café to access the internet from a desktop computer are long gone. According to the data researcher “eMarketer” there are 2.4 billion smartphone users in the world today – that’s more than a third of the entire world population! To put it briefly: If your website cannot be displayed on a mobile device like a smartphone or a tablet computer, you’re not reaching out to a third of the world’s population or – to put it into business terms: 2.4 billion potential users.
Imagine a huge advertising poster with loads of pictures and information on it. And now imagine trying to copy all those images and data onto a postcard in a 1:1 scale. Impossible! The same goes for a website that was purely designed for the big screen of a PC and is now being viewed on the tiny screen of a smartphone. It’s just not possible!
But when it comes to websites, it’s not only the looks that count – it’s also the ease of navigating through all the features a website has to offer. And again – navigating on your PC screen is something totally different that using the touch screen of your mobile device. And that is where responsive web design (RWD) comes into play! It basically transforms your website, so it can be viewed and used on any device.
To make a long story short: None of these 2.4 billion smartphone users would spend more than a second on a website without a RWD framework.
RWD – generating traffic and income
If you’re running an internet business, generating traffic on your website is the fundament of your success. That also counts for all businesses who use their company website for marketing purposes. The first rule for generating more traffic on your site is to reach a top ranking on search engines like Google & Co. Since 2017, Google prioritizes mobile sites over desktop websites. And considering that around 93% of all online experiences start with a Google search, RWD is simply a must for any company website.
Take the extremely well-designed website of a high-class escort service as an example. Most gentlemen who hire the agency to arrange a date with these adorable ladies do so via their mobile devices. Considering the huge amount of competition in this sector, you need to stand out in order to be among the first search results. And although other factors like SEO texting and link building play a huge role in terms of google ranking on the WWW, without responsive web design this successful enterprise would not stand a chance!
User friendliness is another huge advantage RWD brings to the table! Thanks to responsive web design, it is easy and fun to browse through a well-build website. And the more fun a user is having, the longer he or she will stay on the site and is consequently more likely to buy the product or use the service offered. Also, the chance of a creating returning and loyal customer who will not only come back but also promote the website to other users increases with every second he or she stays on a website.
Are there alternatives to responsive web design?
Sure! But the fact that your website must be accessible from any device is basically written in stone. Events like the Web Summit 2017 in Lisbon show where the future will lead us. Every development in our technical world is based on the idea of a mobile access to the WWW.
Responsive web design is the fundament on which most of today’s websites rest upon. But there are other possibilities to make your website mobile-ready.
Adaptive web design – for instance – could be described as a more inflexible version RDW. The idea stays the same: The design frame lets a website adapt to the end device it is visited from. But where RWD kind of fluidly adapts to the browsers’ width, ADW adapts in fixed steps to the browsers width: 320px – 480px –760px – 960px – 1200px – 1600px).
Some companies also maintain two different websites – one for the mobile devices and one for the fixed desktop screens. However, this method will sooner or later probably land in the vast archives of the WWW.
