6 Reasons Why Your Next Design Should be Responsive Design

Visitors are coming to your website / landing page / mail from a wide variety of devices – laptops, desktops, various types of Smartphones, ipads etc. How do you give all of them the same rich user experience you had initially designed? If your response is “by creating multiple versions of your website” then you are entering a world of complexity and chaos. As the number of devices in the market keeps increasing, your list of website/page versions to manage will also increase.

Enter Responsive design, or design which responds to the browser/ device requirements and adjusts itself without diluting the content or the user experience.

Better SEO

Google recommends responsive design for better SEO. This is for various reasons:

1. Google doesn’t want to show a stripped down version of an otherwise rich, high ranked website to its mobile users. [Conflicts with Google’s aim of providing most relevant, rich content.]
2. Building effective backlinks can now be focused on one set urls

Easier Maintenance

A single version of your website is much easier to maintain than multiple versions made for different screen sizes.

Better User Experience

Responsive design allows similar experience for all users, irrespective of the device they use. Compare this with non-responsive design – where user experience on some platforms will be poor; or where there are multiple versions of the site – where content may have been compromised – making for poor user experience in both cases.

Brand Enhancement

Continuing from above, for all the users who didn’t get appropriate user experience, the brand value gets diluted proportionally. Interestingly, in a survey conducted by Stanford Persuasive Technology lab 46.1% of people said that a website’s design is the number one criterion for discerning the credibility of the company. Need I say further?

Future Proof

It is predicted that by 2014 the world will go mobile. This means that mobile sites can no longer be an afterthought. However, with a mobile device being introduced in the market every day, the diversity in screen size is just too much to handle. The way out is to design ‘responsively’.

Cost Effective

The upfront cost of creation of a responsive design template may be much higher than a routine website template but in the longer run all the above reasons save you on cost, making responsive designs more cost effective.

Image Credits: Kirigami template by RocketTheme