Why Responsive Web Design is important?

Smartphones and tablets have changed the approach toward design and user experience. Before the creation of mobile devices with innovative web-browsing ability, web designers had only one primary challenge to deal with keeping the same look and feel of their websites in various desktop computer browsers. Though, interacting with sites on handheld devices is not the same as doing that on a desktop computer. Factors like Click versus Touch, Screen-size, Pixel-resolution, optimized markup and many more have become essential while making sites with Responsive Design.

Before we move forward to why Responsive Design is important? Let's take a look at what is Responsive Design first?

Responsive Web Design. What is it?

Responsive Web Design is a method of laying-out and coding a website so that it can provide an optimal viewing experience, ease of reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling through an extensive range of devices (from desktops to palmtops).

When creating a responsive web design, the designer should make sure that the website's navigation elements, screen-layouts, text, images and other UI elements rearrange themselves on a variety of devices. Thus, one need not spend extra time and money in creating and maintaining one "desktop version" and another "mobile version" of his/her website.

Now, we can move on to the importance of Responsive Design while crafting websites.

Time & Money

People say that making a responsive website is expensive and it's a fact, the cost to make a responsive website is somewhat more than making a conventional website, but the expenses to duplicate a website for handheld devices gets completely eliminated, cutting total development costs, significantly. Plus, a responsive design cuts the total ownership cost, by means of taking away the effort to maintain different versions of a website. Thus, spending the money in responsive website design is the smartest decision.

Increased use of Mobile Devices

Mobile internet users getting increased every day exponentially. As more and more peopleget used to browsing the web through their smartphones and tablets, it is foolish for any website publisher to overlook responsive web design.

The UX (User experience)

While, content is king and discoverability of content are leading success metrics; it is the UX that helps visitors to consume content on any website through the device of their choice, anytime. And, that's why responsive web design is about providing the best user experience regardless of whether they use a desktop computer, a smartphone, a tablet or a smart-TV. Responsive Websites are uncertain to devices and their operating systems. It ensures that users get the best and steady experience of a website on any device of the user's choice.

Thus, rather than classifying website content into dissimilar, device-specific experiences, it is smarter to embrace the responsive web design approach. That's not to say there isn't a business case for separate sites geared toward specific devices, but that kind of design-thinking does not have to be our default. Now, digital content is expected to be viewed on a range of different experiences. Responsive web design offers the way forward.