Responsive Design

Is your website mobile optimised?

When you browse on tablets and mobiles, you'll have noticed that some sites take ages to load and the content or design is incomplete, the navigation is clunky or impossible - argh! These are websites designed to be browsed on PCs rather than on mobiles or tablets.

These days, your customers and potential customers are multi-device. Between them they definitely access websites on smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktops and individually they may have several or all of these devices. So, you need a design that adapts to all these screens sizes and device characteristics. All the elements of your website need to be easily used regardless of the device in question.

Your cross-device compatible website is your opportunity to overtake the competition

Today's constantly connected consumer uses different devices in different contexts, PCs still rule the office and for serious work, but laptops have encroached into the social space, tablets are the ideal choice when relaxing and phones when out and about. When your website is designed to work correctly on all these devices it'll get used on all these devices and you can attract new business anywhere, anytime. That's the challenge and the opportunity.

Whether your website visitor is using a 27 inch screen in his office, or a 3.5 inch screen on his smart phone or anything in between you need to provide a smooth and usable web experience. Not the same experience of course, but a smooth and usable one nonetheless. If you don' t you are driving your customers into the hands of the competition.

Responsive Design - Competitive Advantage for your website

In the last few years, web designers and developers have been grappling with this challenge. The technique which is winning as the most important first step for every website is called responsive design, which adapts the design, layout, navigation, content and information architecture to suit the device in use. If you're browsing this website on a desktop computer, try reducing the width of the browser window gradually and see how the layout adapts. If you're browsing on a smartphone, well, look how instead of a menu that requires mouse over, you've got a menu with a drop-down which you can actually use on your smartphone. That's responsive design in action!

Besides the obvious advantage of increased usability and better chances of user interaction, there are some benefits of responsive design that may not be so immediately obvious:

• By sending smaller images we reduce page load times on small screen devices that may have slower connections
• Search Engines such as Google show images in their mobile results for websites with mobile optimised sites giving those sites an advantage in the search results.
• We deliver simpler and more intuitive controls on smartphones which are fiddly enough to begin with
• Brand loyalty - website visitors are delighted when website owners have taken the time to make their experience enjoyable and useful

Your responsive web design, in safe hands

The goal is simple, the possibilities for making the journey tortuous are infinite and yet, strangely enough when you become expert in responsive design, the solutions are relatively simple too,

At Profitable Web Projects we've been doing website optimization for more than a decade, responsive design is much newer but it builds on strategies and techniques that we've been using for a long time. Work with us to get ahead of your competition by implementing a responsive design for your website!