Responsive Development

I have been doing responsive development for the past ten years. I am very fortunate to have learned the best practices from my web development clients. Developing an optimized product for the largest number of users is the key to getting the greatest number of conversions. I am constantly reading and learning how to achieve this. This is an ongoing process with the number of technologies and devices made available on the market.

Who does responsive design? Plenty of sites have adapted and thrived with responsive development for many years, including the New York Times, Amazon, YouTube, and Wired Magazine.

What Is Responsive Development:

Responsive development is optimizing the website for devices such as tablets or smartphones. The amount of space or “real estate” on these devices means a need to change the user’s layout to interact with the site seamlessly. This means the way a user sees the display on an iPhone will not be the same as how it is displayed on a 23″ monitor.

Why Is It Important:

As more “non-traditional” devices become a part of our modern-day society, we must adjust the user experience for these devices. Even as recently as a few years ago, the percentage of tablet and smartphone users was limited, enough to ignore these users’ negligible loss for conversions. Even Google has jumped onto the responsive bandwagon and is rewarding sites that have mobile versions with higher rankings.

Why Try Responsive Design:

1. Responsive design makes it easier and simpler to share content and link to your content using a single URL.
2. Google’s algorithm is highly compatible with responsive design sites. It can assign indexing properties easily and directly to the page, rather than a signal to corresponding mobile or desktop pages. With a responsive design, the page can be rendered in both versions easily. The desktop version and mobile version also become equal in functionality.
3. On the whole, responsive design requires far less engineering because you won’t have to maintain and update multiple pages to serve different platforms. It eliminates the pain of having to deliver the same content but on different pages/versions of the site just because the user uses a different platform that the main version of your site doesn’t cater to.
4. Responsive design eliminates the common mistakes associated with the mobile versions of sites, including blocked image files, CSS, and JavaScript, unplayable content, faulty redirects that can greatly affect your site’s SEO-friendliness, mobile-only 404s, annoying interstitial ads, irrelevant cross-links, slow mobile pages, incorrect viewport for specific pages, small and unreadable font sizes and improperly spaced/sized elements that make pages unusable on mobile devices.
5. A responsive site has reduced load time because redirection is no longer necessary to obtain a device-optimized view. Redirection by itself is prone to errors, and these errors can degrade the user experience.
6. Only a single Googlebot is necessary to crawl/index responsive sites. The ease at which search engines can crawl your site has an indirect, positive effect on your site SEO as content is kept fresh on SERPs.

Planning A Responsive Strategy:

The best plan for a responsive site will depend on several factors. Some good questions to ask before proceeding would be as follows.

1. Is there an existing site that will need to be converted to responsive?

2. Will the site flow be more difficult for the user on a smaller device such as an iPhone?

3. What technologies are known to the developer or webmaster?

Once some of these questions are answered, it will be important to consult with a designer to get an idea of the best possible layout for each type of device. Also, monitoring how the user interacts with the current site (if one exists) will be the key in determining the layout and process flow for a responsive website build. This information can be obtained by reviewing the Google Analytics information if there is a current site. If this is a new build, some educated guesses will need to be made to determine how the user will interact with the site based on their device.

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