- September 26, 2013
- Posted by: Vishal Shah
- Category: Web Design
The world wide web has almost 4 billion pages, according to World Wide Web Size. Web design trends come and go, and today’s web development has progressed a long way from seeing how many nested tables you could put in your HTML code before you lost track of where you were.
One particularly hot and useful web design trend these days is called responsive design. Responsive design centers around using one design for every device that accesses the page. While mobile plug-ins are available for popular web scripts such as WordPress, according to www.optiinfo.com, responsive web design eliminates the need for creating multiple versions or URLs of the site. Instead, the coding adapts to the screen size and device type accessing the page, picked up through the visitor’s user agent. Content divs and graphics are realigned and adjusted to provide a user-friendly, readable experience that doesn’t clog Google with duplicated content across your desktop and mobile sites.
Maintenance
When you use multiple versions of a website, you have to maintain all of the code. Even if you’re using a plug-in to facilitate the presentation, you still have to keep the plug-ins updated. With responsive design, instead of making changes across three or more sites every time you want to change one element on the page, you only change one set of code. This also provides you with only a single design to create, which is good for your bottom line. This may open up the way for advanced features that increase the usability of the site or enable you to create additional content. The responsive design opens up many possibilities for your mobile users since they don’t have to jump through hoops to make the site appear as it would on their home computers. That provides a familiar browsing experience.
Conversion Ratios
Mobile device users have heavy levels of engagement with the sites they visit through the mobile browser, particularly shopping sites, so making the experience as user-friendly as possible for them is paramount. When you have a properly working responsive design, the user is unlikely to encounter any errors with the ordering process. The content is also in a familiar location from the page they may have looked at on their computer, instead of a completely different design.
Content Management Ease
Search engine optimization uses a variety of tactics to increase your rankings in the search engine. However, content is often key in getting Google to come back to your site and elevate you in the rankings. When you use responsive web design, you only maintain a single set of content, instead of separating out the content for each version of the website. You can relax and not worry about duplicate content or content unavailable for mobile viewers.
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Shawn Hardy Shawn is a communications technology consultant with 10 years of experience.www.webhostingbluebook.com