Five Reasons to Have a Responsive Website

Okay, so there are a ton of unresponsive websites out there. Even Amazon doesn't have a properly responsive site; if you want to shop on mobile, you're redirected to a mobile page. For a long time that was fine, but things have been changing for a while. If your page still looks the same on a phone as it does on a desktop, it's probably time to consider an overhaul.

1. It Looks Great

Full stop! This is reason enough for you to upgrade your site design to be responsive. A fully responsive site looks slick and modern, and there is something satisfying about resizing your browser window and watching the elements change dynamically. It looks more professional when a user can open your site on a phone or a small monitor and not have to either zoom in or scroll to the right to read all of your content. The headache of reworking your HTML is worth preventing the headaches of many potential customers.

2. Cross Platform

With a responsive design, your site looks great no matter where you look at it. It's not something your customers are going to be actively thinking about, but that's how you want it to be. With a well designed site, your customer has no reason to complain, and will just remember that they can go to your site at any time and be able to use it to its full extent at any time on any device. This will also widen your potential customer base to include folks who don't have desktops but do have phones or tablets, which is a leading the market.

3. Easier to Maintain and Build Off Of

This is more related to ditching your table-based, static layout. You're going to have to do this anyway if you want a responsive site. As a side note, if you are building your website using a bunch of nested tables, or old “Dreamweaver” applications, STOP!  Responsive design, when you get down to it, is about sectioning off the parts of your site into discrete boxes that can be moved around and resized with ease. Which means you can add, change, or remove the different parts of your site without potentially fouling up the rest and making a complete mess of things. In a nutshell, don't build your website out of tables!

4. One Page, One Problem, One Solution

With a properly responsive website, you don't need to have a second page designed to redirect the mobile users.  With only one page, you don't need to worry about maintaining two separate pages when you need to change something. This means no more muddling your development with unnecessary scripts to force consistency, or having to roll back changes because the intern in charge of the mobile site forgot to update it with the main site.

5. Better Search Optimization

Search engines, especially Google, will actually favor sites that are mobile friendly over sites that aren't; at least when searching from phones and tablets, which is where most people are searching from now.  What does this mean in terms of Search Engine Optimization?  “Not responsive? Less money!”

For the techies:After all of this, though, it's still kind of a pain. You need to get rid of the set pixel widths, delete the tables, and potentially have to completely remake the website from scratch. It's a hassle.