Don’t underestimate the vital role of responsive mobile web design

People just don’t use the Internet like they used to. Whether it’s quickly checking emails on the bus or seeing what the latest prices are for a book or CD on Amazon while sat in the garden, people are using their smartphones and tablet devices more often than ever before for searching for products and services, where they may have previously resorted to the desktop PC at home or work.

It’s imperative that your company recognises this change by ensuring that your site is as accessible and useful for mobile users as it is for those browsing via desktop.

There are now more than one billion smartphones and 200 million tablets in the world, but there’s another statistic that ought to concern you as an online business owner: the claim of 70 per cent of users that they close an email or webpage without even reading the content if it fails to render properly.

Ensure that your site caters for all

That equates to an immense amount of revenue that you could lose if you fail to make your site fully accessible for mobile users. This is where responsive mobile web design comes in. A responsive site adjusts in accordance with the screen size of the device being used to access it.

If your site is ordinarily a three-column design, for instance, it may switch to being a two-column one for a given mobile user, or if it’s normally a two-column design, it may become a single column one. A truly responsive website design doesn’t just cater to one or two of the most popular screen sizes – it caters for every one of them.

Couldn’t you just build an app instead?

At this point, you might wonder: isn’t this the purpose that a mobile app is supposed to serve? That may be true, but apps have their own issues. While they may make lots of sense to many businesses, apps do have their own functional, maintenance and cost considerations that may make responsive mobile web design the sounder choice for your own company.

Remember that an app is necessarily built for a specific operating system, which isn’t a constraint that the average responsive web design has. The wider audience that is able to use a responsive website rather than an app allows for quicker conversions, both of the content that you already have and the content that you may be interested in adding to your site in the future.

Contact SEO Local now about our highly rated responsive mobile web design services.