Posted
28/06/2015
The importance and benefits of a responsive Website Design cannot be emphasised enough in today’s technology driven world.
What does responsive web design mean?
Responsive Web Design is a process of building a website so that it provides an optimal user experience across all devices, categorised in the industry as Tablet, Desktop and Phone. This ‘optimal’ experience translates into creating a website which is easy to navigated and use across the devices with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling.
A common topic is that of mobile adoption and its extreme growth over the past number of years. Latest figures from Expedia reported that up to 70% of UK Travel bookers access data via their mobile devices.(Report titled ‘Importance of multiplatform devices in online travel content’)
Smartphones and tablets have changed the approach towards design and user experience. Before the mobile device domination and advanced web-browsing capability, web designers had only one primary challenge to deal with and that was keeping the same look and feel of their websites. However, interacting with websites on mobile and tablet platforms is not the same as doing that on a desktop computer monitor. 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.
Responsive web design leads to more than just an improved user experience, other benefits include an increase in user engagement which can be tracked by looking at Google Analytics metrics such as ‘time on site’ and ‘number of pages viewed’. Most importantly, a responsive website has the ability to increase conversion rates by targeting these mobile users. If a website is not working on mobile or tablet devices, users will be less likely to convert. Research shows that 69% of tablet users shopped on their device within the last 30 days. (http://visual.ly/why-responsive-design-important-10-key-statistics)
A quick tip: Google Analytics can offer a wealth of information about how your website performs across various devices and will allow you to identify if there are missed opportunities.
At Net Affinity we are proud to have an Award winning Net Affinity design team who are very passionate and proud of the work they do in creating beautiful responsive websites for our clients.
Some recent achievements from the work they have created:
- Two International Hotel Awards for website design
- Gold and Silver from the W³ Awards
- Two Web Awards for Responsive Website Design
- Winners of the Silver Award at the Davey Awards and two International Hotel Awards.
- Eircom Spider Awards in the Travel Website of the Year category
- 'Best Mobile Solution’ at the Eye for Travel Mobile Innovation Awards
- Finalist in the Samsung Digital Media Awards in the ‘Best in Travel and Tourism’ award.
If you would like to learn how a Responsive Website can work for you, or if you would like more information on Responsive Web Design and its influence on conversion, please talk to your account manager today.
