Responsive Website Design (RWD) is a new approach that allows web designers to create websites that provide an optimal viewing experience. RWD makes websites easy to read and user friendly to navigate with hardly any resizing, panning, or scrolling and can work across a wide range of devices, including desktop computer monitors, laptops, tablets and mobile phones. The job of the web designer is not completed unless there is a smooth transition of how the website functions on the variety of devices. From studying the analytic statistics comparing a responsive website against a non responsive website, the amount of users leaving the site before navigating around it (bounce rate) is considerably higher for the non responsive site, this is because the user on a mobile is more likely to be on the move and so has even less time than on a desktop/laptop to zoom in and out of a site to get the text and images the right size to be correctly viewed. Nobody wants to lose valuable website visitors at any stage but especially if you are running a Pay Per Click campaign meaning capital is lost instantly.

The use of mobile devices to gather information on the web is growing at an amazing pace, unfortunately much of the internet isn’t optimised for mobile devices (Mobile friendly websites). Mobile devices are often constrained by the size of the screen and the amount of information stored on a web page; this means a mobile needs the web information liquified to match the screen. To allow the user to easily read and navigate through to other pages. The key to a mobile friendly website is to allow visitors to gather information quickly and on the move. This means that the visitor can keep moving at their own pace and allows them to make buying decisions through the website at the same time.

If you make pages that look great at any size on any device, you are not putting obstacles in the way of people making buying decisions on the website; this means they won’t need to look else where for a service or product.

The Internet took off quicker than anyone would have predicted, and it’s still growing so quickly. Over the past few years, mobile growth has exploded onto the scene. The growth of mobile web usage is far out pacing that of general web usage growth

These days it is hard to find anyone in business who doesn’t own a mobile device, or multiple devices connected to the Internet. In the UK at the moment there are more mobiles than people, and if that trend continues on mobile internet usage it will eventually out pace that of desktop internet usage within years.

This answers the question, why is it important to have a website that is compatible with all devices including mobiles? If you’re still not convinced, in the first quarter of 2014 – 57% of adults used their mobile phone to get internet access on the web; this includes gather information and social media. (Information from ofcom.org) http://media.ofcom.org.uk/facts/

Proportion of people who use their mobile handset to access the internet:

49% (Q1 2013)

57% (Q1 2014)