The Importance of Responsive Website Design

2014 was a year that showed us definitively the importance of catering to mobile viewers on your website. Millions and millions of people have switched to doing the majority of their browsing via a tablet or smartphone, and yet the vast majority of websites still do not make their content more easily accessible to their mobile vieweres.

If you’ve ever owned or maintained a website, you’ve surely thought about how people are viewing your content. User Experience is one of the most important factors in reducing a site’s overall bounce rate (the percentage of viewers who leave a website without navigating beyond the front page). If your site isn’t mobile friendly, you’re likely to see a significantly higher bounce rate. This is because many users get frustrated when they cannot easily find the information they need on your website. When users get frustrated, they bounce.

It used to be that in order to cater to your mobile viewers, you’d have to setup (and maintain) an entirely separate, mobile version of your site. This was a pain for a number of reasons besides the obvious, and ultimately it was still likely that you were missing some of your viewers due to the tricky process of identifying all of the various mobile browsers.

Those days are gone now. CSS3 and HTML5 brought us a revolution in Responsive coding, which is the process of letting a website adapt to the size of the device on which it is being viewed. Nowadays, you can have your website scale automatically to mobile devices, meaning that you can give your viewers all of the content they need without redirecting them to a separate mobile site or requiring you to maintain two sites. It just works.

As of this month, it’s now imperative that your website is responsive. This is because Google has altered their search ranking algorithm to heavily prefer sites which are mobile-friendly. If your site isn’t responsive, you are very likely to be pushed so far down in the search rankings that you won’t be seen.

Arizona Computer Guru was one of the first website development companies in Tucson to adopt responsive coding techniques. We’re love creating great mobile layouts, and we’d also love the opportunity to help your website maintain (or improve) its search standing and mobile viewership. We encourage you to give us a call at 520.304.8300 if you have any questions about responsive design, or any IT questions in general.