Responsive Design

Web Designs that Convert

Once upon a time, designing a website was simple. Or at least, simpler. That’s because you could safely assume that basically everyone who would be coming to your site would be using a desktop or laptop computer. Today, an ever-growing share of web traffic comes from mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. New devices are hitting the market every year, while some people hold on to their old devices until the bitter end. How can you be sure that your brand’s website looks good and functions smoothly no matter what device people use to visit?

The answer is responsive design. Responsive design is the practice of making the UX/UI of a website automatically adapt depending on the type of device being used to view the site. By using responsive design, your website can rearrange its content on the fly to deliver an optimal experience for each visitor based on the type of device they’re using. Let’s take a look at how it works.

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You might be asking yourself whether responsive design is really that important. If your website looks a little bit different on one device than it does on another, what’s the big deal?

Imagine that instead of being wowed by the beautiful banner image at the top of your homepage, visitors can only see one tiny, zoomed-in portion of it because the screen resolution of their device is lower than what your site expects.

Instead of being engaged by the compelling copy that describes your products and services, visitors are distracted by having to scroll sideways back and forth because the text runs off the side of their phone display.

Instead of being able to intuitively navigate through your site’s menus to find the content they want, they find themselves stuck because your menus require hovering the mouse cursor and don’t work on a touchscreen.

Now you can start to see why responsive design is a big deal!

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How responsive design helps your site, and by extension your business.

Improving SEO

The algorithms of search engines like Google now favor “mobile-friendly” sites in response to the fact that the majority of search traffic now comes from phones and tablets. This means that using responsive design to make sure your site works well on mobile devices can help boost you to the top of search engine results pages (SERPs).

A site that looks good and is easy to use no matter what device visitors are using will also reduce your bounce rate – users coming to your site and immediately leaving – and get visitors to spend more time browsing your site. This signals to search engines that your site is a high-quality resource, further increasing the likelihood that you’ll rank high on SERPs.

Less Dev Time

Without responsive design, you’ll need to invest in design and ongoing updates for both a regular “desktop” site and a separate mobile site or app. This means that even if building a site with responsive design might take greater initial investment, in the long run you’ll save time and therefore money by only having to make updates to one version of the site instead of maintaining two in parallel.

More Conversions

Don’t kid yourself: if your website looks bad and is frustrating to use, it will cost you sales. Potential customers will bounce off your site and take their business elsewhere, to a company with a website that doesn’t waste their time.

This holds true for any industry, but it’s especially important in the automotive space, which is all about style and performance. The reality is that an ugly, poorly functioning website makes your brand look behind the times and plants subconscious doubts in the minds of customers about your competence.

A potential customer arriving on your site only to get a bad first impression because they’re using the “wrong” device is a serious barrier to sales. Implementing responsive design can have a direct positive impact on your conversion rate.

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So what, exactly, makes a website “responsive”? In non-technical terms, there are three main elements to responsive design.

Flexible Grid

The first and most basic element of responsive design is that the site is broken up into a grid layout. Depending on the resolution of the screen of the device being used to view the site, the grid rearranges itself.

On a high-resolution desktop monitor with a landscape orientation, the grid might display as four columns wide. However, on a portrait-orientation smartphone display with a lower resolution, the site might rearrange itself so that all of the page content appears stacked in a single column. This prevents space from being wasted and content from appearing too large on large screens, and prevents unreadably small content and the need for horizontal scrolling on small screens.

Flexible Images

Content like text can be adapted to the shifts in layout of the flexible grid easily enough by changing the size of the font and where line breaks are placed. But what about images?

Flexible images, also called adaptive images, are the second essential component of responsive design. This is achieved by setting the images to scale to the size of their “container” within the layout, by having versions of the image in multiple different resolutions and serving one depending on the screen size, or even using different images entirely depending on the screen size.

Media Queries

By now you know that responsive design is all about the elements of a website automatically being reconfigured so that the site looks its best on different types of device. But how does the site know what will look the best?

The answer is media queries. Media queries allow the site to determine the capabilities of the device being used to view it – whether the screen is in landscape or portrait orientation, to give one very basic example – and make the necessary alterations to how content is displayed.

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When it comes to web design, “one size fits all” doesn’t cut it anymore. But with responsive design, your website can change to fit the demands of whatever device visitors are using.

At Greenlight Marketing, responsive design is an essential element of every website we build. It’s not an option you pay extra for, it’s part of our everyday best practices. If your website is out of date and in need of a mobile-friendly makeover, call Greenlight Marketing today. We’ll work with you to plan and build a new site that always looks great to your customers and delivers what your business needs to grow.