The Importance of Making Your Website Responsive

By Karen Preston-Loeb

We previously wrote about Furia Rubel’s approach to responsive website design. Today, it has become even more important to provide your website visitors with tailored mobile, tablet and desktop configurations. Google now gives preference to mobile-friendly pages by boosting their ranking in mobile search results. While this affects individual pages instead of entire websites, adjusting your organization’s website to be responsive makes good business sense.

What is Responsive Website Design?

A “responsive” website is one in which the page layout acclimates proportionally as you shrink or expand a screen. When a user views the website on a desktop computer, the screen size is generally larger. When a visitor uses a tablet or smartphone, the screen size will scale and shrink appropriately to fit the display of that device. On a non-responsive website, information may be lost as the visual area gets smaller. Responsive websites adapt to allow users to see all pertinent material and to navigate easily to the information they want to view.

Having a responsive website is helpful for a few reasons. It provides the user – who might be a potential client, a current customer or a referral source – with navigation to obtain information on your organization quickly and easily. A frustrated user could lead to a loss of business.

Mobile Has Surpassed Desktop 

Ensuring that mobile website visitors have a positive experience is more important than ever. In recent years, the number of web visits coming from mobile devices has increased steadily. In May 2015, Google confirmed what most digital observers already suspected, that more people now browse the internet on mobile devices than on desktop computers.

The search engine responded to that behavior by giving preference to mobile-friendly web pages in the algorithms that determine which websites appear highest in search results. To see how Google Search views your website pages, run your website URL through Google’s mobile-friendly test.

Today, websites that adapt to deliver visitors a positive experience on every size screen are a necessary part of doing business. Don’t let Google penalize your company for not being mobile-friendly. Consider updating your website to responsive design.

Websites: Intentional Design vs. Purely Responsive Design

By Laura Powers

Furia Rubel develops websites for many companies including law firms, financial service companies, legal industry providers, service providers and government / municipal agencies. All of these entities have audiences that are viewing their sites on various devices. Each audience needs to be provided with the information they are seeking clearly communicated on each device. All of these websites must consider the visual presentation, the user experience and the delivery of content.

Responsive Website Design

The website design industry is buzzing about responsive design. There are many references, blogs and testaments touting it as the next best thing, but responsive design is not a new idea, nor is it a new technology. Providers are just fully realizing that, yes, all of the various devices that website visitors use, need to properly display content to a site’s target audiences.

Website visitors today use the device that is most convenient to them at the time – a traditional desktop computer, a tablet, a phone - often whatever is in closest physical proximity. In many instances, and for mobile phones in particular, websites do not need to display all images and the all of the content of a company’s full desktop website to a visitor.

Cumbersome mobile websites are often the result of a purely responsive design process that lacks a strategic and deliberate plan. Slow load times, unsuitable content display and poor navigation on a company’s mobile site result from lack of pre-planning and strategy in the design and development phase.

Intentional Website Design

Furia Rubel takes an intentional design approach that strategically considers audiences, devices and content and therefore, is a better option than a purely responsive design approach.

Intentional design is an approach to website design and development that is created for each user within the respective media. It is both responsive, in that the site responds to the user’s media, and it is strategic, in that it intelligently considers what information must be served to users on each platform. It is a disservice to a website’s audience to assume that their phone needs to display all the images and every piece of content that their desktop computer displays for the same site. It is analogous to showing a person every television station’s program when choosing what to watch instead of using quick menus to find the program they want.

From our experience in designing, developing, writing and launching websites, we know there are critical pieces of information that users want to see across all devices – phone numbers, main services or products offered, locations, team member profiles and other top-level information. Typically, a purely responsive design is simply a full website tailored to display all site content in a different view on a particular device. Why burden the device with cumbersome menus, images and content in a purely responsive design?