Adaptive, also commonly referred to has responsive, web design is, in essence, the practice of ensuring your site is capable of automatically modifying its layout and usability to suit a wide range of devices. Back in the very early days of websites – you know, when dancing gifs, comic sans, and 3D buttons were all the rage – these sorts of measures didn’t need to be considered; people logged into the web via their boxy, cathode ray tube monitors and sites would simply load up to fill the screen.
These days, however, times have changed drastically. Consider your own internet habits, even on a day to day basis. You likely browse websites on your phone and your computer, at the very least; you may even log in via a tablet or iPad, too.
For each of these devices, the screen size and proportions vary drastically, and ensuring that your website is capable of assimilating itself perfectly within an incredibly wide range of devices is essential.
Adaptive Design is Applicable to Every Type of Business
Try to conceive of a business that is exempt from adaptive design, and you will most likely fail. Even those that have historically operated primarily on computer screens, such as online casino sites, for instance, are now finding that user habits dictate a far more mobile-centric approach.
A site like this cannot hope to keep you entertained and, more importantly, keep you returning to their site rather than a competitor, without ensuring that, when the time comes for you to transition from PC to mobile, the mechanics and overall design of the site will not skip a beat.
From e-commerce to gaming, and everything in between, you cannot consider your site beyond the remit of adaptive design.
Users Don’t Trust Bad Design
Two market your brand online is to exist within one of the most competitive and fickle landscapes imaginable. What’s more, it is risky – not just for you, but for your customers or visitors, too. We all know the red flags of shopping online, and one of those is a bad, dodgy, or hastily thrown together website.
Ensuring that you are able to demonstrate to users that you have invested the time and attention into your website indicative of a trustworthy brand is, to put it mildly, essential to your ability to thrive online. Consider the fact that almost 90% of shoppers claim they would not return to a website after having a bad experience there. It seems fair to presume that, included under the umbrella of ‘bad experiences’, are times when a website fails to put itself together coherently on a mobile screen, for instance.
Google Rewards it
The necessity for adaptive design is so ubiquitous now that even Google has revealed that it chooses to reward sites who invest into it. According to a recent statistic, mobile searches consistently account for just over half of all searches – and if your site is ill-equipped to cater to this considerable market, it is unlikely that Google will give you priority on the results pages.
What this represents is a missed opportunity of titanic proportions for your SEO. Each and every day that you neglect to bring your site’s adaptive design up to code, you are potentially missing out on a considerable amount of visibility,
While it may seem like yet another concern to add to a seemingly endless list of ‘things to do to keep your site functioning’, ensuring that you are on top of adaptive design, and ready to exist on any number of devices, represents one of the most important tasks for your website developers.