Responsive Design 101 - Is Your Ecommerce Website Responsive?

What is Responsive Design?
Responsive Design is new approach of website coding and laying-out so web content can be viewed through various devices.

This design helps viewers providing an optimal browsing experience, ease of reading and navigation with a minimum of re-sizing, panning, and scrolling.
As more and more internet users browse through various devices such as iPad/Tablet, Smart phones, PC's and other internet enabled devices responsive design can push content to all viewers without having to maintain multiple website or code, with  single code base you can target all viewers.
Why is Responsive design so important to business?
Businesses have to evolve with latest proven technology and they must decide whether to build a native mobile apps or a responsive site for their online presences.  

Responsive design helps you to have single website, yet target mobile users and traditional computer at same time, easy to manage and maintain as more devices hit the market.

Few stats:
2.1 billion mobile users across the globe
85% of American adults have mobile devices
90% of them use smart phones for online browsing, shopping etc.



Anatomy of Responsive Design

Responsive design is built on HTML5 and CSS3 (Cascading style sheet), unlike traditional way of building websites were using HTML tables with restricted width and height of the content/images not allowing to grow or shrink to fit the screen, whereas responsive design uses fluid grids with help of using "Div" tags which can adapt to screen size resolution.

Fluid Grids, Flexible images and media are three ingredients that are required to build responsive design sites, identify the content, put together your images, identify the navigation flow as part of your responsive design framework.

(Pic from Mashable)

SEO - Search Engine Optimization
Does responsive design affect SEO? We would say it only helps SEO by allowing search engines to index your regular website pages and not duplicate pages geared towards mobile devices Example: www.Domain.com and M.Domain.com, by being responsive you can avoid duplicate content. 

Google prefers to index responsive designed websites for their search results and Adwords program, responsive design compliments your SEO.



Responsive Design E-Commerce Websites 

E-Commerce websites by design are complex in nature to build, maintain and to keep updated with latest shopping features, trying to keep your E-Commerce website mobile friendly will only make copies of your website thus doubling all your effort.

By using responsive design and building a template with responsive elements you can strike two birds with single stone, more and more internet shoppers are using mobile devices for their shopping list and it's very important to keep your website mobile friendly.

E-Commerce responsive design may look expensive but let me break it down for you, if you decide to have a great looking E-Commerce website targeting computer (PC) users and then decide to build mobile friendly websites your cost of development and maintenance doubles and gets expensive over years and you are duplicating every effort of building powerful E-Commerce website.

Responsive design cuts the total ownership cost, by means of taking away the effort to maintain different versions of a website i.e. a “desktop-version”, a “mobile-version”.  Thus, in the long term, investing in responsive website design is the smartest decision.

Talk to us if you are in need of Responsive design for your Ecommerce website, we can put together custom solution that fits your budget. Check us out at InfoSourcing Inc