The Pros and Cons of Responsive Web Design
Have you been hearing talk lately about responsive web design and wondering if it could do your business any good? In this article, White Peak Digital discusses the pros and cons of this approach in web design so you can determine if it’s the strategy you need for your business marketing needs. But before we break down what it has to offer, let’s first define what responsive web design is.
What is responsive web design?
RWD is basically an approach that lets you view desktop webpages on various non-PC devices such as mobile phones, iPads, smart TVs, tablets, etc. Its goal is to offer the same support to a range of devices for your website by visually adjusting its layout, depending on the size of the screen or browser you’re viewing it from. Though RWD uses the same basic HTML code as its PC-based counterparts, little changes to your website’s CSS determine how your content is displayed on various devices. If you are like myself and unsure of how to accomplish this on your own, you can reach out to web design gatineau and they have the experts that can set up your websites CSS and more to optimize your uses website experience.
Pros of Responsive Website Design
Now that you know what responsive website design is, let’s discuss the advantages of this approach to see if it’s what you need for your business. Here are some of the pros of RWD:
· Ever experienced having to reprogram your website from the ground up just because you can’t view it properly from your phone? When you use RWD, you automatically eliminate the need to develop a separate mobile website, which means huge savings on web development costs!
· You probably know how hard it is to interact with a standard website on your phone. To navigate the site, you need to use your fingers to zoom in and out on the screen until you’re just too tired to keep going. The best thing about a responsive website structure is that it automatically resizes text, images, forms, and buttons to maximize screen space. That doesn’t only let you read text easily, but it also lets the images complement the screen size and the buttons easy to select. That means you don’t have to use all your energy and screen time having to zoom in and out when viewing your website on your handheld device.
· Imagine having to update the content of your site on separate mobile and static websites every time you have something new to share. Hassle, right? When you use RWD, you only have to update your content in one place. Since it’s basically just a standard website with additional coding, you don’t need to do content updates on static websites!
· Perhaps the best thing about using a responsive website design is how it positively impacts your website’s SEO. Since it features exactly the same content as the static site, search engines don’t have to be crawling both your mobile and static websites, making your site pretty much accessible.
The Cons of Responsive Website Design
· One common issue with RWD is that it sometimes requires you to scale down some of your web components, causing certain pages on your website inaccessible. You can’t have this issue when you have a separate mobile website, since it usually comes with an option to access the entire website.
· You hate it when you come across a website that’s taking years to load, and we’re certain you don’t want your own site to be like that. One problem with responsive websites is that they usually take longer to load, since their images are only visually scaled down and not resized for speedier load times. The lag in loading speeds is so obvious when you try to access your site on a mobile network.
· RWD also puts your web visitors at risk of overlooking some important features of your website. Since a responsive website is stacked vertically to accommodate less screen space, there’s a chance users might overlook certain features of your site due to long scrolling.
So you see, using a responsive website design has its own share of pros and cons – and, according to Walker Hill, an essential when running digital activity across that targets audiences across multiple devices. If you still can’t decide whether a responsive website is right for your business, you can search the web for sample responsive web designs to get a better picture of how it actually works.
