The responsive design is a standard today. Develop a website without consider the screen sizes for every mobile devices and desktop computers is a big mistake.

But for the users who don’t know what is a responsive design (or what web developers mean with that term), I wrote this small post about the importance that has for a good web design.

What’s responsive design?

The responsive design is the way that your website will reshuffle its page elements according to the screen size or orientation.

A decade ago, the mobile devices can only browse over internet through special mobile websites version designed for their small screens. To access to these mobile version websites from a desktop computer you had to write an “m.” or “mobile.” before the domain name. Currently, these mobile websites are no longer made thanks to the benefits that HTML5 and CSS3 give to develop a single website which automatically resize to the multiple screen sizes of each devices.

Why responsive design is so important for your business?

From a simple word search to purchases in e-commerce websites, are made from smartphones (more than 60% of internet traffic comes from mobile devices). That is why it’s really important that your website is correctly displayed on the different screen sizes that mobile devices offer to your customers.

Even if the information or product, that the visitor or customer is looking for, is available in your e-commerce website, if there are bugs displayed such as:

• A very small font size to be read.
• The cropped or stretched images placed for bigger screen sizes.
• The tiny links or buttons which cannot be easily touched.

Will get mad your customers, causing the loss of many visits and sales.

Search engines and other web services request responsive design

Responsive design is highly requested by web search engines such as Google, who will give a better ranking to your website moving it to their top search results, not just for having the content that the user is looking for but also for having a good web design and a proper implementation of responsive design.

The responsive design also ensures that our website is approved for employing many web services such as Google Adsense, traffic monetization, Facebook Ads, Amazon referrals, etc.

Ensure a good display of your website elements (images, texts, audiovisual content) will make you a trustworthy partner for your advertisers making easy the connection with potential clients.

When responsive design isn’t enough

Good web design goes beyond looking good on a screen. The use of Semantic Elements tags should also be your priority, this will allow search engines and browsers to easily identify the content of each page and section of your website to deliver it to potential customers and clients.

Some of the Semantic Elements tags are the following:

• <header>: Used as a container for website headers with navigation links and for introductory content on pages and articles.
• <nav>: Used only as navigation links container, so please don’t add any link if doesn’t go to other section or page in your website.
• <figure>: Used to mark up graphics, photos or any type of content related to your article, you can use it with the <figcaption> tag.

Among other tags more like: <aside>, <footer>, <code>, etc.

The misuse of this tags, or not apply them at all, can make the content of your website less relevant to search engines even if you followed the responsive design guidelines.

In a next post I’ll give you a quick guide about how to use Semantic Elements tags properly.

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Have a nice day!