If you own a small to medium-scale business, you probably have a website for it. And that’s amazing! But it would be more amazing if it has a responsive web design.
While having a website showcasing your business profile, products, and services helps you put your business on the map, you shouldn’t stop at that. Go beyond website creation and step into website improvement, and ensure that your target audience will enjoy visiting your website no matter what device they may be using.
What is responsive web design?
Responsive web design (RWB) is an approach to website design that creates dynamic changes to the appearance of a website, so the elements—icons and images—and the layout as a whole remain proportional to the screen size of the device the user is currently viewing the website from.
For example, a visitor viewing your website through their desktop would see a home page layout that fits the size of their desktop screen, but once they switched to view the website through their smartphone or tablet, the layout will change to fit the phone screen or tablet screen.
Why do you need a responsive web design for your business?
So why is having a RWB important for your business? Well, for one, your website serves as your brand’s online representative. How your website looks and functions will impact your target customer’s perception of your brand. A non-responsive web design is more likely to make your visitors feel like your business does not care about customer satisfaction—which would be very bad for your image.
Secondly, an RWB gives your target customers a positive experience whenever they visit your website, regardless of what device they used. This positive experience can influence visitors to stay longer on the website. In fact, according to a study conducted by GoodFirms in 2021, around 73% of web designers believe that a non-responsive design is one of the top reasons why visitors leave a website.
Moreover, having an RWB can be considered a long-term investment, especially for retail and travel sites. Statista studies show that more and more people are using their mobile devices for online shopping and booking transport and lodging. Having an RWB secures your business’ future when most of your target customers prefer making online transactions with their mobile devices over their desktops and laptops.
How can you tell if your web design is responsive?
There are three ways to tell if your website design is responsive or non-responsive. A responsive web design must have these three elements: fluid grids, fluid images, and media queries.
Sometimes called flexible grids or flex-grids, fluid grids refer to web layout columns and rows that can flexibly adapt to the user’s device. For example, a 4-column by a 5-row grid of product photo boxes in your website’s desktop view will smoothly re-adjust to a 2-column by 10-row grid of photo boxes when in mobile view.
The second element, fluid images, are called that because, like fluid substances, the images’ sizes in percentage are designed to shift to fill the size of their container. In this case, the container is the device being used to view the website.
For example, a landscape photo banner that can fill up the wide screen of a desktop will be able to downsize into a portrait-shaped or square-shaped photo banner when the website is opened through a mobile browser.
Media query, the third and last key part of a responsive web design, is a functionality that allows the content of a web page to adapt to the type of media that the page is being rendered in. In a nutshell, a web page being viewed through a desktop or non-touchscreen laptop would respond to the mouse or mousepad, but once the web page is viewed in touch-screen tablets and smartphones, it will then respond to finger taps and clicks.
If you want to test your current website’s responsiveness, you can contact Twin Rams Media for a website design consultation. If it turns out that you do not have a responsive web design, we offer web design services that can upgrade the responsiveness of your business website and help you create a design your target audience will like visiting.