Responsive Web Design: Can Mobile Visitors Access Your Website?
The statistics are almost overwhelming.
The remarkable growth of smartphone and tablet sales has completely changed the way that we access the internet.
There are now 1.2 billion smartphones in the world, with 58% of the US population having access to a smartphone. It’s expected that 500 million tablets will be sold in 2013/2014.
Written By
Dan Partridge
The impact that these figures have on business owners is enormous. The way that customers are interacting with your website has fundamentally changed. As we’ll see below, failing to address this change is potentially catastrophic.
Tablet users typically spend 50% more online than desktop users. John Lewis recently shared that their website generates the most business on Sunday evenings. The frequently used devices? Tablets.
The web design industry has reacted with almost universal agreement: responsive web design is the best way to ensure that mobile visitors access your website.
Why Responsive Web Design?
There are three primary reasons why responsive web design has the potential to be so effective.
Firstly, responsive allows you to transform a decidedly negative mobile user experience into a positive one. Whilst the number of mobile devices has increased rapidly, the majority of websites are still very unfriendly for smartphone and tablet users. Instead of quickly and easily finding information, we all know the frustration of constantly scrolling and panning to try and find our way around a mobile-unfriendly website. Against this backdrop, a mobile web design offers mobile users a positive user experience which is a stark contrast to the desktop-only alternative.
Taking steps to integrate responsive technology – pages which fit the user’s mobile device, correctly sized text, links and menus which can easily be used etc – will help to keep your customers very happy indeed. Failing to make this jump will only result in frustration and negative feedback from the growing percentage of mobile website visitors.
The second reason is that multi-device browsing simply highlights something which is happening anyway. You might be surprised to hear that even the most common screen size only has a 19.5% market share. In other words, we’ve always had a wide range of screen sizes; responsive web design allows us to think about each user’s unique browsing requirements and make sure that they are met.
Finally, integrating responsive web design principles now will help to future-proof your business for when new devices and screen sizes are introduced to the market. Because responsive principles are dynamic, not fixed, we can create an adaptive website which can easily be reconfigured for alternative screen sizes.
Mobile Accessibility is Crucial
As mobile internet usage continues to increase, we’re expecting to see a rise in the uptake of responsive web design. We’re also anticipating that this will become an increasingly effective technique that results in better, faster and more engaging websites.
If you’d like to find out more about responsive web design and ensuring that mobile visitors can access your website then why not contact us for an informal discussion?