Consumer technology is rapidly advancing. Devices that were once used for nothing but talking are now devices that people watch videos on, send instant messages and surf the internet with.
That last action is one thing that businesses have been particularly interested in.
It’s something you should pay attention to if you want to succeed and have a way to expand your business regardless of the way that technology advances.
In other words, you’re going to word why something called “mobile responsive design” is the way that businesses, including yours, should be heading towards.
Why resolution is about more than just pixels
It’s a simple fact that the most important feature of your website is how it looks. The aesthetic design will either make or break a first-time visitor’s opinion regarding your company within just a few seconds of loading your web page.
Because of this, businesses do everything in their power to ensure their website works and looks great. The problem comes at how they do it.
For the greater part of home computing history, most monitors have obeyed resolutions that were within a reasonable distance of each other. 480×320, 640×480, 800×600 and all the way up to 1920×1080 are the most common resolutions that people use for their computers.
The worry about how well a website looked on a 600×480-capable monitor versus a 1920×1080 monitor never was too big of a problem.
Most consumers upgrade their monitors when they purchase a new computer, which means that the “average” resolution will always stay somewhere in the area of “this still looks okay” so long as the lower end of the resolution spectrum could view it comfortably.
The mobile problem
The problem concerning resolutions came when mobile devices entered the web browsing scene.
For every mobile device on the market, there’s a good chance that it has a unique resolution that fits that device best. That means there are resolutions that are comparable to those seen during the beginnings of home computing, yet they use odd aspect ratios that traditional static layouts couldn’t handle.
Businesses were left asking the question, “How can we make a website that looks good on any mobile device?”
The first mixed responses
The first response to mobile device resolutions was to use a separate website that catered specifically to mobile devices.
At the time, this solution worked great.
The reason for this was due to the fact that this was when mobile Internet browsing was first starting. Smart phones didn’t exist yet, so cellular phones were only capable of displaying very basic colors and text.
Even if they could display more, customers would be lucky to see any additional content. Things like 4G networks didn’t exist, so mobile users were left using suboptimal networks for data transfer. This meant that most images would take minutes to load.
Businesses could make do with “watered down” versions of their websites specifically designed for mobile users. If a business was really concerned about mobile viewers, they could use some tricks to allow a web server to output a different version of their website depending on the browser detected.
For a time, this worked because of the technical limitations on a relatively new technology. With the advent of smartphones like the iPhone, however, this changed.
The best solution – mobile responsive design
The businesses that got involved with mobile browsers and tailored their website depending on the type of device being used to browse them were on to something.
They noticed that they didn’t have to recreate content, pay extra for a mobile webmaster, nor did they have to direct customers to visit their “special” version of their website.
They also noticed the mobile users liked their websites a lot more.
This is what gave rise to the idea of mobile responsive design. Utilizing things like JavaScript and CSS, you can alter how your website looks depending on just the resolution that it is being viewed in.
That means there’s no creating special versions of your website for specific resolutions. Mobile responsive designs allow for a web page to be resized in any device, which allows for websites to be viewable regardless of what device is used.
Why should you go with a responsive design?
There’s a plethora of benefits that accompany responsive layouts. A very short list of them can be found below.
- Responsive layouts allow your website to be viewed by anyone in any device.
- You only have one website to take care of.
- Visitors can visit your website on their computer and mobile device. In other words, they can visit their website and they can show their friends your business’s website while they’re away from their computer.
- Your SEO performs better because you have just one URL for your content.
- It makes your website accessible to everyone. That means more potential customers for you.
You should give responsive web design a try. More web design firms and individuals are making the move to building these layouts because they’re so flexible.
DomainsFLOW has a large section filled with the Genesis mobile responsive design layouts that work seamlessly with the latest version of WordPress.
Check it out if you want to see just what makes responsive designs different from traditional website layouts, and why a responsive design will ultimately do nothing but benefit your business.
