Responsive web design in Leeds

Why responsive web design?

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Remember going to a website on your mobile phone and having to take about three trial runs at hitting the right menu item? That’s because God made our fingers too fat to tap on tiny text on our tiny little mobile phone windows effectively. But visit a responsive website design on your mobile phone and you’ll see the menu much easier to find your way around.

Have a look at the bluehoop.co.uk website on your mobile phone. Tap the ‘menu’ icon (a horizontal box with a couple of horizontal lines through it) and a lovely, usable drop down menu appears! With 30% of our customers arriving on our site via a smart phone, we’re safe in the knowledge that they’ll be presented with a great looking website that they can to navigate around effectively.

A responsive website will allow you to present the ‘real’ website on someone’s laptop, and another version of reality on their tablet or smartphone. Lots of people in the web design world are agreeing that a ‘mobile first’ strategy is the right way to go for websites. That is, the website is designed to be viewed on a mobile first, and then ways are worked out to make it look just as stunning on a laptop or desktop computer as well.

Google says it likes responsive web design

…and if Google prefer it, like it or not, so should you, because Google runs the game when it comes to searching on the internet. Google’s guidelines say that they’d rather see a responsive site returned in the search engines than a separate mobile website. There’s only one url, and one set of coding for it to decypher so you can see why they prefer responsive web sites.

Responsively designed web sites also suffer less from a high bounce rate. The bounce rate is the amount of visits a site gets that navigate away after viewing only one page. Of course, you want all of your visitors to fully engage with your website and to take a look around, but they won’t do that if they visit a non-responsive site on a smartphone and they can’t easily move around. A low bounce rate is one of the metrics that Google use to rank you higher in the search engines.

With world-wide mobile internet usage likely to match desktop usage sometime soon, and with the vast majority of websites NOT mobile-friendly, you’ll find yourself ahead of the curve if you present a great mobile user experience to your potential customers and clients.

We’d love to have a chat with you about responsive web design. If you’d like to learn more about how a responsive website could help your business, please call on 01943 968262 or use the contact form.