Lately, we’ve been talking with a lot of businesses who are getting ready to undergo a website overhaul.  They want to turn their website into an effective lead generation machine, and they’ve realized that their current site just isn’t cutting it. They’ve spoken with design agency after design agency and have a bunch of options on the table, but when I ask them if they’ve had anyone suggest a responsive website design, most of the time I’ve been met with puzzled expressions.  So I wanted to take some time to talk about what responsive web design is and why I like it so much.

In a nutshell, a responsive website is one that is designed so that its elements are viewable and easy to access no matter what device the user is viewing the website from.  It is not a mobile site.  In fact, responsive web design renders the need for two different sites - desktop and mobile - void.  This is because responsive web sites are “smart” and can recognize what size screen it is being displayed on, and adjust its menu items and other elements accordingly, so that large amounts of scrolling are unnecessary and visitors still see the same content.  Confused?  Let’s check out an example:

1. Navigate your computer’s browser to TIME.com.  See how the page displays?  Looks like it’s built specifically for computers, right?  
2. Now, take your smartphone and navigate its browser to TIME.com.  Looks like it was built for your phone, right?  
3. Ok, now while you have the page open on your smartphone, rotate it 90 degrees so that it’s either vertical or horizontal (whichever orientation you weren’t already holding it in). Did you see that?  How the menu changed and top stories moved into a different position?  You didn’t change the website you were on, the website just understood how you were looking at it and adjusted to fit your screen accordingly.  Pretty cool, huh?  This would also work if you had a tablet available and accessed the same website.

Responsive web design requires a little more forethought than a simple website redesign as you and your designer must talk through how people will use your website, what devices access it most frequently, etc (don’t forget to make sure your Calls To Action are always visible!).  But at the end of it all, you should come out with one single, easily accessible website that is able to display all your content no matter what device your visitors are using. For businesses who want to generate leads from their websites, this can be an invaluable tool. More and more people are accessing the web from mobile and tablet devices, and providing those users with a website experience equivalent to what they can get from a desktop computer is very important. Did you know that:

• In May 2012, 10.11% of website page views came from a mobile device
• In 2012, smartphone and tablet sales exceeded that of PCs by almost 200 million units
• Between 2010 and 2015, the number of mobile web users in the US is expected to increase by 16.6%

The age of mobile web access is here and is only going to grow. To address this issue, I really encourage businesses to look into responsive web design as a viable option for their own website redesign projects in order to capture the maximum amount of leads from their mobile web visitors.

Have other questions on responsive web design or all other things web?  Drop us a comment below!