Your WordPress site is gaining traction. You have people leaving positive comments. Someone other than your mom is reading your posts. There are some days when, for just a second, you see yourself publishing a book based on your blog. Things are good.
Just because things are good doesn’t mean it’s time to be complacent. You always need to be one step ahead. It’s not enough that your WordPress blog is fabulous on a laptop. Now it needs to be fabulous on a screen of virtually any size. It’s not complicated. You just need to pay attention.
Here’s the Story
Smartphones sales in 2014 are predicted to be double the sales of PCs! When you think about it, it totally makes sense. Smartphones are more accessible. Essentially anyone, (and I mean anyone) no matter who they are, what they do, where they live or how much they make can own a smartphone. Smartphones are less expensive. You can put your Smartphone in your pocket or purse. Of course smartphone sales are going skyrocket.
With that in mind it’s time to discuss Responsive Design, Designed for Mobile and Mobile Apps.
First, a History Lesson
The launch of the iPhone created a totally new environment for developers. More and more people were using their iPhone to search the Internet. How a website appears on a laptop can be very, very different, not a good way from how the very same website appears on the screen of a mobile device.
This created a complicated and tedious situation for developers. Back in the day (not so very long ago) developers were tasked to create websites that supported smaller devices and screen sizes. Two websites. Two sets of code. Often the mobile site version was a simplified version of the desktop version. This did not guarantee a very consistent user experience, which Tcan lead to unhappy users.
After the iPhone we all know what happened, everyone jumped on the bandwagon and started developing smartphones and tablets, all with varying screen sizes. A blessing and a curse depending on how you look at it. Due to the onslaught of so many new mobile devices more and more people use their smartphones and tablets to access the Internet. That’s good right
Not if you’re a developer. Coding a specific site to fit each and every screen size is totally inefficient, time consuming and annoying
The Answer
The time had come for website design to adapt. Enter Responsive Design, created by Ethan Marcotte. Responsive design enables developers to maintain one code across all screen sizes. Brilliant! To make it even more brilliant, the all mighty Google declared that responsive design as the web standard.
Responsive Design – Why You Need to Embrace It
If Google sets something as a standard, you might want to pay attention.
Improved SEO
- The whole idea of two websites and two sets of code can be problematic when it comes to SEO rankings.
- Using responsive design and having one URL rather than two makes your WordPress site much easier to index on Google’s search algorithms.
- One set of content makes it much easier for search engines to crawl your site. It makes the search proves so much easier and in term saving Google resources which in turn benefits you. It’s a win/win kind of thing.
Improved User Experience
- The ultimate beauty of responsive design is that your site will seamlessly resize and change layout depending on the screen size of the device from which it is accessed.
- No more slow pixelated loading, pinching or zooming.
- Your site will be made to fit any screen size so that there’s no missing content. Nothing is worse when you have to wait for a site to load. People’s patience level is essentially non-existent when it comes to the web. If someone has to wait they may not stick around or go to another site that has adopted responsive design. And one more thing, having one URL makes your content easier to share. Again, it’s a win/win kind of thing.
Tomorrow Read…
