Mobile Sites: Responsive Design Is the Way to Go

As mobile traffic skyrockets thanks to the increased usage of smartphones and tablets, companies are scrambling to reel in more of the mobile traffic to convert it into leads and sales. As a result, more and more companies are now seeing mobile websites as a mandatory requirement for doing business online. However, there is a right way and a wrong way to build a mobile site.

Many companies currently have a desktop and a mobile version of their website but unless your website has a budget for upgrades for both sites, you can wind up having to stick with the same old website or face very high costs for maintenance and upgrades.

Responsive design is best
Using responsive design to build your website is the best way to go. Not only does responsive design often mean a better user experience for your users, but it also means that you do not have to build a separate website for your mobile visitors. Building a mobile site on a separate domain or subdomain like m.example.com or example.com/mobile means that your main site will not get credit for the links and page rank being attributed to your main website. This is bad for SEO and your site’s search engine rankings.

The other risk is making sure that both sites even display the same content. This could lead to errors, broken pages and users ending up on the wrong version of the site due to erroneous signals sent to the website by their computers. It also does not give users an easy way to change the version of the website without hunting for a mobile or desktop version button.

The worst part is that if you change to responsive design in the future by integrating the mobile site with the main site, you will likely end up with a slew of broken links. This means that your rankings will be harmed and you can even lose traffic by having users end up on broken pages on your site. In order to avoid this, you would be well advised to do things the right way the first time instead of relying on a method that will soon be obsolete.

Responsive design equals a better user experience
Using responsive design means that your site’s visitors will be able to enjoy the same user experience regardless of whether they visit your site using a desktop computer, mobile phone or tablet. With electronic devices changing nearly daily, it simply doesn’t make sense to build a site to be designed for a specific browser or device that will likely be obsolete in a few years or less.

Responsive design also means that your site visitors will inherently know how to browse your site with ease. The responsive design incorporates many best practices that essentially train web users on how to navigate a website that has been designed using responsive design.

Responsive design makes for easy upgrades
Using responsive design is very cost effective in the long run because it means that a web designer will only need to modify small portions of your website in order to make upgrades. Without responsive design, you would likely be stuck with making small upgrades to your site until it was within your budget to do a complete overhaul.

Are you looking to have a mobile site designed for your business? Let infintechdesigns.com help. We design high-quality websites and we can find the right solution for your business today.