Responsive Web Design
Over the past few years, responsive design has become an absolute must for developers created a website. We know how important our devices our to us and how much we use them for browsing the net. In 2014 an Ofcom report presented data that suggested only 22% of people first turned to their phone for browsing the internet. Back then 3G speeds were nowhere near the level of home broadband speeds. With the introduction of 4G in 2014 mobile use for browsing increased rapidly. 2016 was the first year mobile web use had overtaken desktop.
With mobile and tablet devices vastly more popular to use for casual browsing over a traditional desktop its quite clear consideration must be taken when designing for devices.
What is Responsive web design?
Responsive web design is a term first coined by Ethan Marcotte, also the creator. Essentially responsive web design refers to a website that is designed to adapt to the screen that it is being viewed on. A website designed for a large screen will most likely not look so great on a mobile device. Therefore time must be spent tweaking the layout so when the dimensions of the screen changes, the content will adjust accordingly.
Why use it?
Responsive web design will overall improve a user’s experience whilst navigating through the website. Unresponsive websites can be difficult to use, links and button may be in areas of the screen inaccessible, an image description could be pixels away from the image its describing or can simply look very unattractive. All these issues can frustrate users and deter them from ever coming back to your website. Damaging if you are an e-commerce site.
As screen resolutions decrease it is common to remove less important content from your website to allow extra room for the more important website. For example, you could have an e-commerce website selling toys. When displayed in a desktop view the website may provide a weekly blog from its staff members on its homepage. Something not overly important when selling toys. As the screen reduces to a mobile resolution this content can be removed and only display its most important content. These less content on a page, the faster loading speeds can be.
If you have your website designed to adapt to mobiles it could mean avoiding having to develop a stand-alone application for mobile. Not only would this save you time and money but will be much easier to maintain and make changes to in the future.
As time goes on device use for browsing will only increase and screen resolutions can vary greatly in dimensions and orientation, therefore responsive web design should be an absolute must when developing your site. Get in touch with us if you need your own responsive website for your business, we can able your website to compatible for all screen sizes.
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