Why Responsive Design ?

Responsive Design prepares websites for the future of modern website design by making them beautiful across multiple devices. Responsive design is a method of developing a site that is completely flexible regardless of device. Rather than detecting a specific browser type or device type, the website automatically orientates itself based on the screen size of the device. A combination of reformatting and re-optimizing the site as a whole give a practical flexibility beyond imagination.

We all live increasingly on our smartphones. In the U.S.—where 171.5 million people (71%) own such a device—smartphones have become the staple of everyday life and the on-the-go tool of choice for consumers looking to catch up on emails, tap their social networks or even tweet about a recent sports game.

Most of the time when a customer visits your mobile website, they are not there to peruse all of your products or services. They are on your mobile website for a specific purpose such as comparing your price to a competitor’s, looking for your address or phone number, or checking your brand’s consistency across online and offline channels from one of your physical locations. Providing the information they’re looking for with with intuitive navigation and a fast loading mobile site is the first step towards building a business relationship.

Users are looking to your mobile site or app as either a complementary feature or main pathway towards making a conversion. If you can effectively offer your products or services and establish a brand identity via mobile, your potential customers are more likely to make a purchase. Even if most of your actual conversions are not from M-commerce, your mobile channels can provide a streamlined and more memorable buyer journey for your customers.

70% of users will access a mobile site or app to find out more information about a purchase, and nearly 50% of them will do that while they are in-store shopping. An inconvenient mobile marketing experience leaves the door open for your competitors, which could lead to you losing potential customers who are already browsing your products in one of your stores.

Users who are looking to make a purchase expect mobile pages to load in less than 3 seconds. However, 85% of full-site mobile pages take 4.8 seconds or longer. By making your brand more than just a nice looking mobile site, but also one that loads quickly on checkout pages, your users will remember and utilize your mobile site often, which will increase your overall ecommerce sales.

Millennials are one of the largest population segments in the U.S., totaling about 72 million, 76 million Baby Boomers. And these young consumers are the largest segment of smartphone owners.

While age plays a role in smartphone ownership, this technology doesn’t have a gender divide.

Men and women in the U.S. own smartphones almost equally, with 87% of men owning these devices and 89% of women as of the second-quarter 2016.

Overall, Android continues to lead the smartphone market in the U.S., with 51 percent of smartphone owners saying they owned an Android OS device. Nearly a third (43%) of smartphone users have an Apple iPhone, and Blackberry, Windows and others owners represented another percent of the smartphone market. Among recent acquirers who got their smartphone within the last three months, 48 percent of those surveyed in February said they chose an Android and 43 percent bought an iPhone. Phones and tablets are much more personal than desktop or emails, therefore it creates different user behaviors. It’s important to capture and build a personal relationship with your customers by understanding their habits.

Things to consider for your mobile website:

There is no alternative. The web has gone mobile. And to get ahead of your competitors you must tap into your share of the mobile market. Design a great looking and fully functional mobile site and enhance your web presence exponentially. Is your website properly designed for mobile devices? Are you getting good traffic from mobile internet users? It is important that you design your mobile site and present information properly as you do for your regular website. With an increasing number of mobile users and search volumes everyday – it has now become necessary for a properly designed and presented mobile version of your site. With a perfectly designed mobile site you can tap into a huge market segment of mobile users and can boost up your business. To take advantage and capture the potential of this segment, you should take note set of the following do’s and don’ts rules while designing and deploying your mobile site.

When it comes to mobile websites, simplicity is key. Because of the lack of space on the screen and Internet connections that are often slower, it’s important for visitors to have access to what is most crucial, and as little else as possible.

One thing you may find surprising when viewing mobile websites is how much of the content is prioritized for the visitor. Of course, all websites should be user-focused, but because most websites are run commercially for business purposes, there are often elements that aren’t necessarily important to visitors, such as banner ads. While advertisements have largely become an accepted part of the Internet, most mobile websites are ad-free. The content available on a mobile website is typically of the highest priority to the average mobile visitor, not the company, although in the end the company benefits by having a more usable website.

When deciding what is essential for a mobile site, it is important to think about what the user is doing at your site, why they’re visiting, and what they want or need to do. A mobile page-user’s motives may diverge drastically from that of someone using a normal, non-mobile web site. Another aspect to this issue that must be considered is the status of the average mobile visitor. What are they doing? Why are they accessing the website at that time? What are they likely and unlikely to have any interest in? Keep in mind that the goals of mobile visitors are often vastly different than those of visitors sitting at a desk.

QR Codes
A Quick Response code is a bar code that stores data such as a website address, telephone number, email address and more. A variety of smart phones have the ability to scan and interpret these QR codes, which can, for example, lead the user to directly to a website without having to type the address.

The more media you include on your mobile website, the more data will need to be downloaded. Data on mobile devices is more expensive than data from an ADSL line. The use of media should be optimised and minimised to ensure that the user does not incur high costs by browsing your mobile website.
Shorten the text on your mobile web pages as much as possible so that the user does not have to scroll too much on their mobile device.
If your website has a lot of different sections consider which sections or pages are most important and which ones can be omitted on the mobile version of your website.
If you use forms on your website consider which fields can be omitted. It’s not as easy for users to type on a mobile device as it is typing on a traditional keyboard.
Get straight to the point. Make sure “action” buttons such as “make an enquiry” or “buy now” are easy to find on your mobile website.
- Use alt tags whenever you can, because some visitors will have images disabled!
- Headers take on increased importance in mobile web-design, where design capabilities are limited by the format, so make use of them!
- Keep colour contrast in mind, because on small mobile screens, readability takes on much more importance! Good colour choices ensure that your site is easy on the eyes, and colour choices may need to be different on mobile phones, which may display colours differently than a monitor.
- Test the site as much as possible! The only way to figure out of your site looks good on a particular phone is to try it on that phone. Like any good site, testing is key, but for mobile sites, which pose some very idiosyncratic difficulties, testing is uniquely important.

When setting up your content management system features can be made available so that you can choose which pages should appear on the mobile version of your website. Additionally we’ll also give you an extra field where you can enter shortened text for your mobile website.

DO’s for mobile website design:

Define yours and your visitors needs – then design your site.
Use a single column layout for your mobile website.
Emphasize on “Trackable” than “Clickable“.
Keep the file size to a minimum.
Boost up the loading time so that slow net users can use your site.
Take especial note of usability considerations on the mobile web.
Use a simplified approach to design pages, layout, and navigation.
Make sure that visitors’ don’t have to toggle horizontally to view the full content of the site.
Make navigation simple and intuitive.
Use the semantic HTML and proper mobile CSS to make your site more efficient.
Write precise and informative content for your mobile users.
Include an option so that mobile visitors can switch to full site view.
Design with a fluid layout.

DON’Ts for mobile website design:

Don’t use large images.
Avoid using special effects.
Don’t make clickable elements harder to click.
Avoid using a “hover” effect.
Avoid using images for gradients, rounded corners etc. Instead use CSS3 to reduce the load time of your site.
Don’t deploy the site without thoroughly testing it on different mobile platforms and devices.

For the vast majority of tasks, mobile users will get a vastly better user experience from a well-designed mobile site than from the full site.
For a small minority of tasks, mobile users will be slightly delayed by the extra click to the full site.

The basic point? The desktop user interface platform differs from the mobile user interface platform in many ways, including interaction techniques, how people read, context of use, and the plain number of things that can be grasped at a glance. This inequality is symmetric: mobile users need a different design than desktop users. But, just as much, desktop users need a different design than mobile users.

With mobile devices taking over the place of the PC, not having a mobile friendly website is like committing business suicide.

Millennials are one of the largest population segments in the U.S., totaling about 72 million, 76 million Baby Boomers. And these young consumers are the largest segment of smartphone owners.

While age plays a role in smartphone ownership, this technology doesn’t have a gender divide.

Men and women in the U.S. own smartphones almost equally, with 87% of men owning these devices and 89% of women as of the second-quarter 2016.

Things to consider for your mobile website:

When it comes to mobile websites, simplicity is key. Because of the lack of space on the screen and Internet connections that are often slower, it’s important for visitors to have access to what is most crucial, and as little else as possible.

The more media you include on your mobile website, the more data will need to be downloaded. Data on mobile devices is more expensive than data from an ADSL line. The use of media should be optimised and minimised to ensure that the user does not incur high costs by browsing your mobile website.

Shorten the text on your mobile web pages as much as possible so that the user does not have to scroll too much on their mobile device.

If your website has a lot of different sections consider which sections or pages are most important and which ones can be omitted on the mobile version of your website.

If you use forms on your website consider which fields can be omitted. It’s not as easy for users to type on a mobile device as it is typing on a traditional keyboard.

Get straight to the point. Make sure “action” buttons such as “make an enquiry” or “buy now” are easy to find on your mobile website.

Use alt tags whenever you can, because some visitors will have images disabled!

Headers take on increased importance in mobile web-design, where design capabilities are limited by the format, so make use of them!

Keep colour contrast in mind, because on small mobile screens, readability takes on much more importance! Good colour choices ensure that your site is easy on the eyes, and colour choices may need to be different on mobile phones, which may display colours differently than a monitor.

Test the site as much as possible! The only way to figure out of your site looks good on a particular phone is to try it on that phone. Like any good site, testing is key, but for mobile sites, which pose some very idiosyncratic difficulties, testing is uniquely important.

When setting up your content management system features can be made available so that you can choose which pages should appear on the mobile version of your website. Additionally we’ll also give you an extra field where you can enter shortened text for your mobile website.

DO’s for mobile website design:

Define yours and your visitors needs – then design your site.

Use a single column layout for your mobile website.

Emphasize on “Trackable” than “Clickable“.

Keep the file size to a minimum.

Boost up the loading time so that slow net users can use your site.

Take especial note of usability considerations on the mobile web.

Use a simplified approach to design pages, layout, and navigation.

Make sure that visitors’ don’t have to toggle horizontally to view the full content of the site.

Make navigation simple and intuitive.

Use the semantic HTML and proper mobile CSS to make your site more efficient.

Write precise and informative content for your mobile users.

Include an option so that mobile visitors can switch to full site view.

Design with a fluid layout.

DON’Ts for mobile website design:

Don’t use large images.

Avoid using special effects.

Don’t make clickable elements harder to click.

Avoid using a “hover” effect.

Avoid using images for gradients, rounded corners etc. Instead use CSS3 to reduce the load time of your site.

Don’t deploy the site without thoroughly testing it on different mobile platforms and devices.

For the vast majority of tasks, mobile users will get a vastly better user experience from a well-designed mobile site than from the full site.

For a small minority of tasks, mobile users will be slightly delayed by the extra click to the full site.

With mobile devices taking over the place of the PC, not having a mobile friendly website is like committing business suicide.