Monday, January 7, 2013

The Perks of Implementing Responsive Web Design

People have migrated towards dynamic usage of devices like tablets, smartphones, and PCs. When people happen to surf the Internet on different devices, the same website may be viewed differently across different devices. We have seen that several websites have rendering issues, when the mode of viewing is changed. This is because they are not mobile ready or tablet ready.



There has always been a debate whether to build websites specific to the device or to develop one that fits all. In the latter approach, the usage of responsive web design is essential to get the website that renders perfectly well in all modes of viewing. Responsive web design involves several techniques for optimization like grid based fluid layouts, adaptive images, and jqueries. The outputs of responsive web design are flexible and display layouts that adapt to different screen sizes. There are several advantages for implementing responsive web design methods and a few are discussed here.  


Benefits for Developers and Users



  • Images that are not responsive can cause delays to scale down and time is wasted when unnecessary HTML and CSS codes are downloaded. Responsive web design avoids this and speeds up download times.

  • When you develop different sites for different devices, it requires development from step 1, which is cumbersome and time consuming. You will not only save on time when using responsive development techniques but also save money. There is a need for developing just one streamlined site.

  • Maintenance woes are a headache to developers and site owners alike. Maintaining several sites, for instance, one site for Android and one site for iOS consume resources. Instead, all you have to do is make your responsive site scalable when you build it, so that maintenance issues are easy to manage.


Responsive Web Design Optimizes Marketing Efforts


The sites that have a responsive web design are pleasing to the eyes, whatever is the mode of viewing. This user-friendly characteristic of responsive sites allows for better conversion rates.
Analyzing traffic for your content becomes more goal oriented when you follow responsive web development methods. Improving traffic will help you improve conversion rates.


The social media marketing efforts are focused, as only a single website is available for social media integration and the 'likes' and 'favorites' are routed from a single URL as against several in the case of targeted websites.


Advantages for SEO


When there are different site versions available, they have to share all the links, comments, likes and shares for the same pages across different versions. Search Engines might leave out a version while indexing. In the case of a single responsive site, the SEO elements mentioned above are all in a single site. This has multifold benefits. The first is, all your SEO efforts are taken note by the Search Engine and none is missed. Another advantage is that, responsive websites do not require any redirects and there is no need for user-agent targeting.  


The websites developed by Nike and Sony are good examples of Responsive web design. These sites are similar across devices with some device specific variations that are strategic, to the minute detail. It is evident that attention-to-detail is necessary for making responsive web designs work to our advantage.


This is a guest post by Sofia Fern. She is a guest writer who writes more about digital cable and high speed internet. Start to find cable deals today.

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