Mobile Friendly Web Design

Web design is a lot more involved than just the appearance of your website. It actually responds to functionality principles that evolve as technology does. For instance, in the last few years with the rise of mobile devices versus personal computers, we have seen a shift in web design toward responsive web design. No longer is the focus of web design on desktop screen displays, instead, as more and more people do the majority of their Internet surfing right on their phone, web designers are now focusing on creating websites that adapt to the size of the display the websites are rendered in. So, whereas before a static design website would mainly be conceived to be displayed on a large screen, such as the ones found in laptops and personal computers, and would later have a hard time rendering correctly on smaller screens, such as those now extensively used in smartphones, responsive design websites can handle both large and smaller screens, so no matter where you browse, the website looks and feels the same. This is the magic of responsive design.

And there is actually an added advantage of responsive design, besides the obvious benefit of making code and design flexible for screens of all sizes, and that is the possibility of search engine optimization. In fact, Google has stated that responsive design is their recommended choice for web design, leading many people to believe that responsive web design may be used as a ranking factor for search engine optimization purposes. While there is no direct evidence that responsive design is directly used as a ranking factor, John Mueller, webmaster trends analyst at Google, has stated that there may be desirable incidental effects, such as mobile devices users visiting often and recommending your website precisely because it renders correctly no matter what the size of the screen may be and this can in turn improve the ranking of your website on search engine result sets. But, as with everything, there are precautions that you would be best to take to take advantage of the desirable effects of responsive web design on search engine rankings. To mention just a few, responsive web design websites are typically slower to load than comparable alternatives of web design configurations. This can be a problem for the unwritten, but generally accepted, rule that mobile pages should load in less than ten seconds to avoid losing visitors because of the slow speed of loading. Another related factor to consider is failing redirects, which seem to affect responsive web design websites. The logic is simple, if search engines cannot locate you, they cannot rank your website. These are just two of the many elements that good responsive web design must consider.

There are many other factors that make a responsive web design effective, but that requires a knowledgeable team of experts to produce a website that renders correctly across all screens, such as those at Web Design Northern KY, the real experts in Search Engine Optimization Northern KY.