Why Responsive Web Design?

Responsive design is currently the best method towards offering the best user experience on a vast range of mobile platforms, from smartphones to tablets and other mobile devices. Some people tend to be confused when it comes to responsive website design; many believe that mobile website design is the same as responsive design; they are wrong.

Mobile vs. Responsive Design

Before responsive design process was developed, mobile design was the leading concept on the mobile browsing market; however on of the huge problems of mobile web design regards the size and resolution of served content. In other words, there was no possibility to adapt the size of images and the layout of the webpage to fit inside the screen of a mobile phone; however, responsive web design solves this problem.

Responsive design enhances user experience over the web when browsing from a mobile device by serving content in such way that it will fit perfectly inside the screen, no matter its resolution on display size. The main advantages of responsive design over the obsolete mobile web design are:

1. Better text management: Using responsive web design scripts, users won’t need to zoom in or out in order to properly read the text from your website; instead, it will be automatically adjusted and aligned in order to be perfectly visible on the mobile device it was served to.

2. Faster image loading and fitting: Images are the most bandwidth hungry elements from any web page, and, because mobile bandwidth is many times limited, responsive design ensure that the right image size is served to the device, while in the same time making sure that it does not exceed bandwidth capabilities.

3. Multiple layouts for multiple screen sizes: It is virtually impossible to create a custom layout for each and every screen size and resolution, as different ones are developed day by day. Instead, responsive design solves the problem by creating multiple layouts, each fitting a certain category of screen size and resolutions, adapting them as need.

4. On demand hiding or showing content: Some websites feature so much content on one page that it would be very difficult to fit it on the small screen of a mobile device and still offer a pleasant visual experience. Instead, users are able to use a responsive web design feature that will allow them to hide or show different parts of the content, allowing the layout to expand or contract, thus resulting in a proper view.

5. SEO improvements: The ultimate advantage of responsive websites over classic mobile websites comes when it is about search engine optimization. By changing the content on demand, responsive design allows for the same URL to be used over all mobile devices, thus giving crawlers the chance of faster indexing of HTML pages.

To conclude, everyone must admit that responsive design represents the future of mobile browsing, and, maybe in short time, the future of home browsing; with its great advantages over the mobile standard, responsive design must be implemented in order to grant mobile device access to your website.