Think for a moment about how you surf the web. How many different devices do you use? How often do you connect with a mobile device instead of your laptop or desktop?
As recently as a few years ago, creating an online presence required little more than a simple website and maybe a bare-bones mobile site for the handful of visitors connecting through their smartphones. These days, that just doesn't cut it. More and more visitors are connecting from their smartphones and tablets, and they expect the same browsing experience that desktop users receive. Creating an effective presence on the modern Web now requires robust, flexible design.
Compatibility with mobile devices is no longer optional—it's a necessity.
So how do you ensure all visitors have the same experience on your site? Traditionally, this problem was solved either with the creation of a separate mobile site or a dedicated app. However, these solutions are far from ideal, and usually end up costing you more in the long run.
Creating a separate mobile site, while ensuring mobile users have access, still doesn't provide the same experience as a desktop user. It also requires more work on your end, requiring you to maintain two separate sites instead of one. And while creating a dedicated app can improve on the mobile experience, they're inconvenient, making customers find and download an app rather than simply visit a site.
A key feature of the Web is convenience.
For some, this extra step of finding and downloading an app is enough to make them skip over you and your site entirely. Thankfully, there is another option available. By using a technique known as responsive design, you can deliver the same experience to all of your visitors regardless of the device they use to connect. Responsively designed websites automatically scale and adapt to meet the needs of a user's device. Differing screen sizes, operating systems, and other obstacles are no longer an issue.
With responsive design, you need only update and maintain a single website—that's it!
Not only does responsive design provide a better experience for your visitors, but it also makes things a lot more simple on your end. Operating multiple sites and mobile apps is costly in terms of time, money, and resources. Each site and app needs to be maintained and updated at the same time, increasing your workload exponentially. This provides cross-platform support without all of the corresponding overhead. Plus, using responsive design can boost your search engine rankings by allowing you to have a single URL rather than separate ones for desktop and mobile.
At the end of the day, responsive websites are essentially futureproof. Their adaptive nature allows them to provide the same experience for every possible device on the market today, and for devices and platforms that haven't even been created yet.
Gone are the days of getting away with bare-bones mobile support for your websites. As more and more users are transitioning from desktops to mobile devices, proper support for these users has become an absolute necessity.
Responsive design is the perfect solution. With a single, responsively designed website, you can give your visitors a single, high-quality experience, regardless of device or platform—for a fraction of the time and cost.
