So why would you need a responsive website? I’m going to go through some of the major points why it will help you, and what it can offer.

1. Brand Consistency

Branding has become a buzz word recently, but has/will always exist. A brand is how you are perceived by your customers and competitors and that is why brand consistency has become so important.

The goal of responsive design is for a user to experience the same vision and message of your company on any device. Social media services like Twitter build applications for smartphones, tablets, and computers that give the same look and feel of the service on any device. That is the goal of responsive design for a responsive website.

2. Optimization

Have you visited a website on your smartphone and were not able to read the text? Were you constantly zooming in and out to scan the page, only to find out the navigation was impossible to click on? Responsive design is the answer. It uses percentages and breakpoints for you content to be fed in the best layout and functionality for the current user. When responsive design is done right a 27″ monitor and a 3″ phone offer a user-friendly experience.

3. Better Maintenance

Having one domain and dozens of great content management systems (CMS) available, it has become much easier to maintain a website compared to 10 years ago. Web masters are not the only ones that control making changes to websites anymore, anyone with a good CMS can make every change they need. Not all CMS are the same, so choosing the best one for you is very important.

4. Clean URLS

Domain URLs used to be a long strong of random characters that had no significance. Over time, those long strings of characters began to have meaning and define the web.

On Facebook you can find a user or page with a url like this: http://facebook.com/username. Sharing articles, building QR codes, and directing users is simple and to-the-point with domains like http://mydomain.com/services. Building clean urls is not always provided by default, so ask your front-end developer to provide that feature before your website goes live, and if you website doesn’t do that right now, I would seek help in making the transition, it’s well worth it!

In Conclusion

The web is constantly evolving and this article could be “out-dated” in six months to a year, but the web is going to stay. Google Glass is the next big shift in technology, but sooner or later our refrigerators or bathroom mirrors may end up offering the web. Responsive design is a great start to offering any size device you website.

Resources

• Responsive from Zurb
• Responsive Testing Tool
• Article: Responsive Web Design

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