Have you heard of the term ‘responsive website’? Essentially all it means is that you can see your website ‘nicely’ displayed across tablets, PC’s and phones.
Watch this quick video to learn more and start increasing your reach, conversion and sales by making your website responsive.
The question is, what is a responsive website and why do you need one? We are not going to talk about what a responsive website actually is. Let’s go over here and I’ll show you what a responsive website is.
What is a Responsive Website?
A responsive website is a website that is flexible enough to change it’s look in order to work on any device. Everything from a phone, a tablet, a computer, a television, and every other size in between. How do you know if a website is responsive? You go to the actual website, get your mouse, and drag the corner of the website to make the screen smaller. If you want to do this right now, you can go to my personal website, which is DaleBeaumont.com and you can try this for yourself.
The Problem with Unresponsive Websites
Two years ago, I had an unresponsive website which I had maintained for 10 years. But the website was fixed, and if you try to adjust the screen, nothing would change. In fact, when it gets smaller, you basically cut off half of the screen. If you view the website on a phone, the text would be tiny and very hard to read. The only way to read the text is to pinch the screen and make the text bigger. If you wanted to read a sentence, you had to make the screen bigger, and move the page using your finger. You have to skim through the page by moving your fingers back and forth repeatedly. That was really annoying for people.
From Computers to Smartphones
This wasn’t such a big deal a few years ago, because people then view your website using computers, and very few people were using their smart phones. However now, the smartphone has become the world’s number one computer, because it’s a device that you can have in your pocket all day every day. In fact, the average person now uses their phone over 150 times per day. A couple of years ago, the amount of traffic on a phone was less than 10%, but now Google tells us that over 50% of all web traffic is done on handheld devices. Over 50% and that number is reported to grow to over 70%.
Unresponsive Websites Means a Poor Customer Experience
Probably 95% of the existing websites were built for the computer and nothing else. They’re unresponsive and inflexible websites. They look great on a computer but they look terrible on any other device. This is a real problem, because if 70% of the people coming to your website would have a poor experience and couldn’t find what they’re actually looking for easily, they’re simply just going to go to another company that does have a better user experience.
Responsive Websites Adjust to all kinds of devices
Let me go back and show you what I’m talking about. You go to a website, get the corner of the page, and basically drag it. As you can see, the website is basically smart enough to know that I’m running out of real estate here, and it starts changing the design in order to accommodate. Everything is now working fine for this screen size. This is what you will be seeing on a mobile phone for example. If we make the screen a bit wider, this is what you can expect to see on a tablet device. You’ll have a different experience every time. Then once I may make the screen even bigger, we now have a design that works great on our actual computer.
If you want to see another example of a responsive website, you can go to our other website which is businessblueprint.com.au Again grab the corner and see how the whole website reformats. Responsive websites look great on whatever device you’re on. I’m just showing you how it looks on the computer screen, but of course when you log in on a tablet or on a phone, you don’t need to do anything, it just knows the size that it has to play with, and it changes the website automatically. There is nothing to be done from the user’s end.
Having a Responsive Website Increases Your SEO Ranking
Using responsive websites is important not only to improve the user experience. But it is also essential from an SEO point of view. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s the process of making sure your website ranks really well within the search engines. There was a time where by this didn’t really matter, but now it actually does. If your website is not responsive, then you shouldn’t expect to have your website ranked very well these days. Google actually now knows if your website is responsive or not. If you have a responsive website, Google gives you a lift in the search engines, Unfortunately, it punishes you if you don’t have a responsive website. This is something that is now too important to ignore. I’ve just given you a live demo right now and it’s time to wrap up this video.
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