What Makes a Website Responsive

According to the Pew Research Center, roughly one-third of Americans use their mobile devices for the majority of web activities. The booming mobile technology industry suggests this number will continue to rise quickly.

Is your website ready for an all-mobile future? No? Time to put it at the top of your priority list. The reason is simple. If your website isn’t easy to read, navigate, or engage with on smartphones and tablets, you’re likely losing customers.

Here’s what differentiates a responsive site from an non-responsive site:

1. The user experience is clean.

A quick look at your analytics will tell you what pages mobile users access, and what actions they are taking. That is the information which needs to be most easily accessible on your mobile site. Even if there are multiple pages and subpages, your responsive website needs focus on offering quick access to the most important ones.

2. The site changes size automatically.

Responsive sites are coded in CSS3, and one of its features is something called media queries. Media queries check for a device’s dimensions and then tailor your content to fit the device size – without changing the content itself.

3. Content is always readable.

In a non-responsive site, you have to zoom in (sometimes a lot) and then move the page around to see everything. A responsive site automatically adjusts text size to ensure your content is easy to read – the user doesn’t have to do a thing.

4. Buttons are easy to tap.

Your responsive site will include buttons that are big enough for people to tap – to email you, call you, set up an appointment, or even make a purchase. If your site is non-responsive, users will have to zoom in on the button in order to tap it. Or, if your site has text links instead of buttons, then tapping on the correct text might be next to impossible. In that case, you may end up losing countless leads or customers.

 

Interested in the technical “how-to” of responsive websites? Check out these straightforward explanations from UX Movement on getting started with responsive design.

If you’re struggling to design a website that is responsive to the growing number of mobile devices on the market, why not leave it to the pros? Our team can create a website that thrives on any screen.

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