Why Your Business Needs to Use Responsive Web Design

Why Your Business Needs to Use Responsive Web Design

rayw
| 8 Oct 2013 |

On a breezy, fall evening, two friends were grabbing a drink at a local Starbucks. Amid the chatting and laughing, the friends were also searching for Halloween costumes for a party they’re attending in two weeks. Both friends were searching for costumes at the same retail website through their iPhone 5c and Samsung Note 3. Although they’re on different devices, they both saw the same, but equally horrific, website design layouts. Both viewed a website that’s too small for their smartphones, forcing them to continuously zoom in and out in order to read the product details and navigate the page. After 5 minutes of fiddling around with the cumbersome mobile website, both friends left the webpage and bought two $150 costumes from an optimized mobile retail store instead.
 
This story illustrates consumer behaviors today. Now, when consumers can’t find what they want on your website easily through their beloved smartphones, they’ll abandon you immediately. They’ll instead find a more user-friendly website that enables them to purchase their desired products or services conveniently. The easiest way to create a mobile-friendly webpage is to use responsive web design. According to Mashable, responsive web design is technologies that “use media queries to figure out what resolution of device it's being served on. Flexible images and fluid grids then size correctly to fit the screen. If you're viewing this article on a desktop browser, for example, try making your browser window smaller. The images and content column will shrink, then the sidebar will disappear altogether.”
 
A responsive web design will also allow the following:
 

  1. Accommodate increased mobile traffic.

    Today, 17.4% of the global web traffic comes from mobile. This is a 6% leap compared to the 11.1% in 2012. This figure will likely continue to rise as Gartner predicts that the shipments of smartphones and tablets will surpass the sales of PCs and laptops by 7.05 times by 2017. In addition, 46% of consumers today use mobile devices to research exclusively. To accommodate the boom of mobile usage, you must use responsive web design to ensure your prospects receive astonishing mobile user experience. If you fail to serve your mobile users’ needs, you will lose them permanently. Moreover, this demand for responsive web design will likely increase as more and more consumers are visiting your website through their smartphones or tablets.

  2. Provide consistent mobile user experience across all devices.

    With responsive web design, you can ensure your web content is presented consistently across all mobile devices. Regardless of whether your consumer is using the iPhone 5c or HTC One, your website’s layouts will always look the same (crisp and updated). This will also help you save a tremendous amount of time as you won’t need to create separate mobile sites to accommodate the different screen resolutions of various devices. That said, if you choose not use responsive web design and allow your mobile webpage to look like your desktop version, your mobile content will look extremely. This will ultimately inhibit your consumers from comfortably viewing your content, browsing your pages, and clicking on certain web components. 

  3.  Rise to the challenge.

    Your consumers will shop on your competitors’ mobile webpages if they find your mobile site to be cumbersome. Today, having responsive web design is no longer a plus – it is a necessity. That’s why global companies such as Nike, Apple, and Toyota have all adapted to this shift in the mobile landscape by using responsive web design for their mobile sites. Their competitors such as Adidas, Samsung, and Honda have also responded to this transformation by also applying responsive web design to their own pages. This showcases the vitality of responsive web design in serving today’s consumers’ mobile needs.

  4.  Leverage in-built functionalities to provide users with additional features.

    You can add a multitude of features with responsive web design to produce seamlesss shopping or browsing experience. With responsive web design, you can showcase features such as your address and phone number when consumers search for you on their mobile browsers. You can also allow your prospects to call you directly by clicking on your displayed phone number. These features are particularly useful if you’re targeting local businesses. 

  5.  Manage your mobile website effortlessly.

    You can easily manage your mobile website with responsive website design. As opposed to constantly updating your mobile site to coordinate the changes of your desktop website, you can automatically modify your mobile site with responsive web design. Additionally, you can easily assess your mobile page’s marketing performance with responsive web design as you don’t have to create separate mobile-only websites for different devices such as the HTC One or iPhone 5c. Instead, you can sync everything with responsive web design and all you have to do is apply your Google Analytics code to your mobile website. This will enable you to measure your mobile marketing performance conveniently through your primary Google Analytics account.

Today, responsive web design is one of the most crucial tools in the business world. By using responsive web design, you will be able to accommodate the rise of mobile usage, deliver consistent mobile user experience, and provide prospects with convenient communication channels. By attaining these benefits, you will be able to reduce your mobile bounce rate as well as augment your conversion rate and revenue. This in turn will surely help you gain competitiveness in your dynamic industry.
 
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