The approach towards design and user experience has changed greatly, thanks to smartphones and tablets. Prior to the surge of mobile devices with web enriched web-browsing capabilities, there was only one primary challenge that designers and developers had to tackle — keeping the same look and feel of their websites in various desktop browsers.

So What is Responsive Web Design

Responsive web design (often abbreviated RWD) is an approach to web design in which a site is crafted to provide an optimal viewing experience – easy reading and navigation with minimum of resigning, panning, and scrolling – across a wide range of devices (from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones). (Source: Wikipedia, 2013)

Websites are designed with users in mind, bu the users' experience depends on what their browser understands. Responsive websites respond to their environment. We are only at the tip of the iceberg as far as creating adaptive experiences go. With more devices coming out each day, we need to step up and meet our users where they are.

"Day by day, the number of devices, platforms, and browsers that need to work with your site grows. Responsive web design represents a fundamental shift in how we'll build websites for the decade to come." – Jeffery Veen

The "One Site Fits All Devices" approach will soon be the norm. As internet traffic originating from mobile devices (anything that isn't desktop is referred to as "mobile") is rising exponentially, it would bold for any website publisher to ignore responsive web design.

By 2014, mobile internet is predicted to take over desktop internet usage. (Source: Microsoft Tag, 2012)

Recently, BostonGlobe.com took the responsive web design initiative. Jeff Moriarty, Boston Globe's Vice President of Digital Products said, "Ultimately we expect to have more people accessing our site via tablets and other mobile devices than from the desktop. We really wanted this design to set us up for that mobile future with a single site that's built to adapt to the user."

Why Is This Important?

As a business owner, you may be thinking to yourself, "Well, I already have a 'mobile-version' and a 'desktop-version' of my website. Why would I want to invest in a responsive website?"

Simply put, it's the smart decision.

By adopting the responsive approach, you will throw out the need to exercise the option to build versions of your website for every popular device platform that you expect your audience to be using. Thus, no longer compartmentalizing content to disparate, device-specific experiences. Responsive websites are agnostic to devices and their operating systems. This ensures that users get the best and consistent experience of a website on any given device.

Currently, 57 percent of consumers will not recommend a business with a poorly designed mobile site. Similarly, 40 percent of consumers will go to a competitor's site after a bad mobile experience. (Source: Compuware, 2012)

How Is This Going To Affect My Page Rank?

According to Google, responsive web design has many advantages when it comes to SEO as well. By designing a responsive website it will keep your desktop and mobile content on a single URL, which is easier for your users to interact with, share and link to, as well as, for Google's algorithms to assign the indexing properties to your content. Google can discover your content more efficiently as it wouldn't need to crawl a page with the different Googlebot user agents to retrieve and index all the content. The effort you put into search engine optimization is pooled on one site, reducing costs and improving the performance of your campaigns.

Still on the fence? What to learn more about responsive web design? I are here to help – give me a shout and we can help you strategically think about your online presence so you can make the right choice for your business.