Advantages of Responsive Web Design

Top 5 Advantages of Responsive Web Page Design

There is NO doubt that Responsive Web Design is very important for today’s webdesign point of view.

Smartphone and tablet adoption rapidly increases, so does the importance of mobile-friendly websites. Smartphones and tablets have changed the approach toward design and user experience. Before the spread of mobile devices with advanced web-browsing capability, web designers had only one primary challenge to deal with keeping the same look and feel of their websites. However, interacting with websites on smartphones and tablets is not the same as doing that on a desktop computer monitors. Factors such as Click versus Touch, Screen-size, Pixel-resolution, support for Adobe’s Flash technology, optimized markup and many more have become crucial while creating websites with Responsive Design.

If SEO is a core component of your digital marketing strategy, having a mobile–friendly website is becoming essential. Mobile sales have already overtaken desktop sales, and mobile Internet usage is predicted to overtake desktop internet usage by 2014. It is only logical that mobile search will overtake desktop search at some point in the near future as well.

What is Responsive Web Design?

Responsive Web Design (RWD) is an approach of laying-out and coding a website such that the website provides an optimal viewing experience — ease of reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling — across a wide range of devices (from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones).

The designer creating a Responsive Design should ensure that the website’s navigation elements, screen-layouts, text, images, audio/video players and other UI elements re-adjust themselves on a variety of devices. Thus, one need not spend extra time and money in creating and maintaining one “mobile-site version” and another “desktop-site version” of his/her website.

Now, having understood what is Responsive Web Design, let us Check the advantages and why Responsive Design is important while creating websites.

Advantages of Responsive Design:

1. Super Flexible

Responsive web design sites are fluid, meaning the content moves freely across all screen resolutions and all devices. Both the grids and the images are fluid. Just as a liquid spreads out or draws in to allow its content to fill an allotted space and retain its appearance, responsive web design’s fluidity achieves the same result with website content on a device screen.

2. Excellent User Experience

While, content is king and discover ability of content are foremost success metrics, it is the user experience that enables visitors to consume content on any website through the device of their choice and preference, anytime. Thus, responsive web design is about providing the optimal user experience irrespective of whether they use a desktop computer, a smartphone, a tablet or a smart-TV. Responsive web design accommodates the busy professional during the day and the wide-awake college student needing access to your site anytime. No scrolling or resizing is needed for any visitor to access your website from their favorite device.

3. Cost Effective

The advantages of having a single site that conforms to the need of all devices are significant when compared to having two separate websites. One website costs less than two, and the savings can be substantial. Sites designed solely for mobile device traffic don’t offer the advanced navigational techniques found in traditional websites, and they also require the user to maintain two separate web addresses for your site. This is inconvenient for most people and can cause them to check out the competition’s website. Responsive web design enhances SEO efforts by having all your visitors directed to a single site no matter what they prefer to use as a device.

4. It is Recommended By Google

With 67 percent search market share, when Google speaks, search marketers listen. Google states that responsive web design is its recommended mobile configuration, and even goes so far as to refer to responsive web design as the industry best practice.

This is because responsive design sites have one URL and the same HTML, regardless of device, which makes it easier and more efficient for Google to crawl, index, and organize content. Contrast this with a separate mobile site which has a different URL and different HTML than its desktop counterpart, requiring Google to crawl and index multiple versions of the same site.

Additionally, Google prefers responsive web design because content that lives on one website and one URL is much easier for users to share, interact with, and link to than content that lives on a separate mobile site. Take for example a mobile user who shares content from a mobile site with a friend on Facebook who then accesses that content using a desktop, which results in that user viewing a stripped down mobile site on their desktop. This creates a less than optimal user-experience, and because of the large emphasis Google is now placing on user-experience as a ranking factor, this is essential to take into account with regards to SEO.

5. Very Easy to Manage

Having a separate desktop and mobile site requires having separate SEO campaigns. Managing one site and one SEO campaign is far easier than managing two sites and two SEO campaigns. This is a key advantage a responsive website has over a separate mobile site. That being said, there are benefits to having a mobile-specific SEO strategy, such as optimizing for keywords that are more likely to be searched when someone is on their smartphone. For example, someone performing a mobile search for a local restaurant may be more inclined to use the word “nearby” in their search query. However, a separate mobile site is not a requirement for a mobile SEO strategy, and there’s no reason why mobile-specific keywords can’t be incorporated into a responsive design site as well.

At the end it is your decision, whether you make it or not.

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Common Reasons For Website Failure

5 MOST COMMON REASONS for WEBSITE FAILURE

How would you define a good website? Most people answer with something like this:

"I want to find what I'm looking for. Fast."

People visit websites because they're looking for solutions to problems. Even when they're playing Candy Crush, they're solving a problem. They're eliminating boredom or successfully putting off something they don't want to do.

Think back to the last time you were online. It's a pretty safe bet that you googled something, which means you were looking for a solution to a problem. You probably visited at least one website where you couldn't find what you were looking for.

The result? You left the website to find one where you could easily find what you were looking for.

The same thing happens on your website. People visit your site for specific information and go elsewhere if they can't find it. And since we're all super busy with attention spans shorter than goldfish, we want to find that info as quickly as possible.

Here are five common things that cause websites to fail...and what to do instead.

1. Confusing Navigation
Your navigation menu is the list of links at the top of your website (about, contact, etc). It's how people find their way around your website.

The names of your navigation items should clearly identify what they link to. Save your creativity for you work and use standard names in your navigation to make it easy for people to find things. If you have a link to your blog, call it 'blog' instead of 'musings' or 'thoughts'.

2. Homepage Overwhelm
A lot of people treat their homepage as a bulletin board. They cram as much onto its possible—image sliders, welcome messages, opt-ins, social media icons, blog posts, services, the works.
This completely overwhelms website visitors. There are too many options to choose from, so visitors choose none and leave the website.

Use your homepage to clearly guide visitors to complete your primary website goal, and direct them to what they should do next.

3. Not Mobile Responsive
You know those annoying websites you have to scrunch and zoom to be able to read on your phone? Those websites are not mobile responsive, which makes them hard to use on phones and tablets. 
60% of people use their phones to access the internet. Even when they're at home, people are online on their phones and tablets whilst watching TV. If your website is hard to read on mobile devices, they won't stick around.

Mobile responsiveness is such a big deal that, as of April 21st 2015, Google will penalize websites that aren't mobile-friendly by not displaying them in search results on mobile devices. That means your website will not be found by the 60% of people who are googling on their phones.

4. Hard to Read
People are busy, and sometimes just plain lazy. If your website is hard to read, they'll leave and find a website that doesn't make them squint.
Fonts, colors, contrast, hierarchy, line height, letter spacing, line length and whitespace are just some of the factors that contribute to readability. Web designers take all of these factors into consideration when designing a website because they know the importance of readability in keeping visitors on your website.
Here are two things to check without going into the geeky designer details:
Fonts
Have three people look at your website on computers and mobile devices. Can they easily read the text? Are any fonts hard to read? Is the text too small or too big?
Contrast

High contrast (black text on a white background) makes things easier to read. Low contrast (gray text on a slightly darker gray background) makes things harder to read. Ask those same three people if they can easily see the contrast between the text and background.

5. Form Frustration
I was about to buy an ebook the other day...until I hit the buy button. I was presented with a long form asking for my name, email address, mailing address, phone number, gender and date of birth.
What?! It was a simple PDF download to be paid with PayPal. Why were they asking all those irrelevant, personal details?
I left without buying the book. Shocker.
The same thing happens on your contact form, newsletter signup form, checkout form and other forms on your website. The more people have to fill out, they less likely they are to actually do it.

Keep your forms simple and only ask for information you actually need.

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Using Social Media to Engage Your Audience

Using Social Media To Engage Your Audience

Small business can benefit tremendously in growing your online brand using social media - but getting it right can often take several months and huge amounts of time and effort on your part. Think of it this way. You place and advertisement in your local newspaper often several times per year, costing you anywhere between $50 and $500 per ad and the only ones who get to see your ad are those who subscribe to that newspaper or magazine. With some success you might recover the cost of that advertisement in direct sales, but let's be honest, in most cases you seldom recover print advertising costs.

If used effectively, social media is much more powerful and most importantly, it allows your audience to ENGAGE. By this I mean that readers can comment on your products and services, your audience can engage each other in conversation, they can offer testimonials, and all of this allows you to tailor your business to your own specific market group. With the right social marketing strategy that includes images, videos, and carefully chosen words, the sky is the limit - you just have to throw yourself out there.

Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, Tumblr, YouTube - just to name a few, can be powerful form of advertising for any small business. Here's the best part and I know you're gonna like this - it's all FREE! You don't need to feel pressured into tweeting daily or posting on Facebook daily because it's all about quality - not quantity. You can have a much more effective impact by carefully choosing "what you say and not how often you say it." 

More and more people are making their buying decisions online. I would venture to say that those decisions to buy or not to buy are based largely on consumer feedback and this again, is where you benefit directly from the use of social media.

It takes an average of between three to five years for any small business to reach it's prime - that is, to attain a plateau both physically and financially. Time and money of course, being your two largest assets. You've got the time or you wouldn't be in business. As for money, you can conciously choose to spend it carelessly on small community newspaper advertisements or you can put that 30% budget back into your own pocket simply by taking advantage of social media and giving up as little as 2 hours per week of your valuable time.

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