You’ve heard the term “responsive design” getting tossed around. And you kind of, sort of, know what it’s about.
But let’s be honest…do you?
It’s actually not that difficult an idea to grasp. You might’ve tried to learn about it, but some of the techno-speak may have scared your off (I know I’ve been). If you think of responsive design as simply standardizing your website’s appearance across all technological devices, you’re halfway to getting it.
Let’s start first with why it’s necessary for the growth and vitality of your business.
An ever-growing number of people access online information from their smartphones, tablets and game systems, away from their laptops and desktops. This is especially true for the millennials – the demographic group between 18 to 34 or so. This tech and social-media segment often won’t take the usual route to plan a vacation. So your website needs to have a good user experience (UX) to capture the attention and enable these young adults to plan a vacation with your company.
What this boils down to is you don't want your site looking garbled or hard to navigate on mobile device. You'll lose potential customers much faster than you think. You don't want that.
In addition, it’s not just millennials who are using their mobile devices to research and book travel. People of all ages are becoming increasingly reliant on them as well.
Here are some numbers to illustrate that point, according to Huffington Post Business:
- More than 20% of searches on Google happen on a smartphone or tablet
- In the US, 25% of internet users exclusively use a mobile device to search
- Mobile internet usage will likely exceed desktop internet usage.
More reasons to use responsive design include ease of use with Google, conversion rate increases, improved user experience and management, and competitive advantage.
So now, how do you make your site’s design compatible with mobile devices?
The good news is most of the time, you don’t have to worry about it all. That’s right – even a techno-dummy like me can have a site with responsive design and not have to think about HTML, CSS and all those other alphabet soup codes.
Many website platforms will have mobile-ready themes where you simply need to see if it’s good to go for mobile. The codes are already embedded in the theme. So all you have to do is create a great site.
But if you don’t have an automatic platform for responsive design, have some time and don’t mind engaging in a little DIY, then check out this article from Ethan Marcotte. This will tell you how to make sure your site is mobile-friendly. And isn’t that exactly where you want to be?
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