Making sure your website stays on top of current trends and advances in technology relative to web development is more important than ever. While business owners may be familiar with responsive web design, it is often a bit of a mystery to people unfamiliar with the back-end nuances of their site.
Regardless of familiarity a question about the importance of responsive design emerges. In short, responsive design ensures a consistent design no matter how a viewer looks at your website. This is important for a number of reasons, but the three below are easily the most important.
#1. Responsive Designs Work Everywhere
The biggest reason to employ responsive web design is that it gives a site flexibility in relation to its users. More specifically, websites can be viewed on various devices (i.e. web browser, a tablet, or smartphone) while having a consistent look and feel without designing three different websites.
Although sites in the past often had different versions that were used to give an optimized feel to a specific device or browser, responsive design is based upon the idea of a flexible grid. These flexible grid elements on the page can have different placement in relation to the size of the screen. Because of this, proper responsive design will always give your business the best look it can have no matter who’s looking at it.
#2. The Future of the Web is Mobile
While older web technologies have been largely dependent on the desktop browser system, the entire technological paradigm is changing as more users make use of mobile technologies to do business. Fifteen years ago, salespeople would have carried a lot of equipment to do a demonstration for a web-based technology. Today’s cloud storage and mobile-friendly business applications; however, allow for viewing the same information over a tablet.
This sounds theoretical, but it is in fact really happening: desktop usage is a shrinking percentage of browser share versus newer mobile technologies. Mobile technology is now considered the future of computing, and responsive web design is based around the paradigm shift taking place in business right now; thus, ensuring that your site is ready for the future.
#3. Responsive Designs Make Use of More Current Technologies
Companies employing newer back-end technologies such as Microsoft SharePoint ensure that their data is better taken care of, ready for responsive design, and better protected against security threats. One of the biggest problems facing the web today is quick obsolescence, so web designers have to work well in advance of potential compatibility problems later. Perhaps the biggest reason for adopting responsive design, then, comes from practicality: not only are responsive sites capable of handling various device types and sizes, but they are also capable of handling types and sizes that don’t even exist yet.