With more people using their smartphones and tablets to browse the internet, it has become increasingly important to create a website that works across multiple platforms. Imagine a website with responsive web design that adjusts to the device that your customers are using to view your business online. Imagine the content, the text, titles and the images actually moving so that they fit within the size of that specific screen. Whether its a tablet or an iPhone or an iMac or a PC desktop! You can literally see the adjustments happen as the browser size shifts from one size to another.

What Is Responsive Web Design

Responsive design is a web development and design technique that creates a system or a site that react to the size of a users screen. Responsive design will optimize your browsing experience by creating a responsive and flexible web page, optimized for the device that is accessing it. There are many advantages of having a responsive website in todays digital business. Some of these advantages are as illustrated below:

Google Loves Responsive

If you ask Googles Developers and Webmasters, they actually recommend using responsive web design due to the benefits it will give you. It will consolidate your site so you do not need a separate mobile URL, giving you one easy to manage site.

Improves your SEO

Searching engine ranking is among the first thing that many website owners consider. The higher your website is ranked in the search engine, the more visible it is hence the higher the number of viewers you will have in your site. The benefit here is in the fact that you will only need to optimize content for one link. The URL structure remains constant for all devices. With Responsive design you have one URL that is easy to update and optimize your content which in turn optimizes your content for all devices. Whether its a Samsung phone, iPad or desktop responsive web design makes it easy for the Google crawlers to index your website pages.

You have one website to maintain and one set of code

Prior to responsive designs, a business would have a desktop version and a mobile version of their website. Building a separate mobile website does have a few benefits of its own, and in some cases creating a standalone mobile version works well. These were essentially two separate websites, and this caused mobile websites to be difficult to rank. If a website had attracted several high quality inbound links over the years they were starting from scratch when they launched their mobile versions.

If a website features a lot of content, a responsive version of the website could soon become the scrolling version, with users having to give their index fingers a serious work out just to navigate through the content. This is where a mobile site, with content which has been carefully refined for mobile browsing, can come in handy.

Staying Ahead

Not many sites currently utilize responsive web design. By making your site responsive, you will stay ahead of other businesses who do not want to invest in this technology yet. People are starting to catch on and by the end of 2014 almost all websites will be responsive to keep up with the growing number of mobile phone and tablet users.