Future Proof Your Website

When you decide to purchase a new website, whether it’s for a new business, re-brand or just to improve the end user experience, you need to be looking at what the future holds for website design. This is not just about the site itself, but do you know how an end-user (which in most cases equals a potential customer) will access your site?

We all remember the trials and tribulations we have had in the not too distant past, trying to see an actual web page on our mobile phone, rather than the list of blue hyper-links, and the annoying little square with a cross through it, where a fabulous image should be. Then, came mobile friendly sites. Often these would look cheap and tacky because there were few, if any images and certainly non that were high resolution. Another problem was the fact that the website owner needed two sites, one for mobile phone and one for a P.C. You could also always tell if a site was made for mobile, because there would be an ‘m’ in the URL.

 

The introduction of Responsive Web Design was a massive forward move in the industry and has had a massive impact on the end-user experience. Expert programmers realised the need for a single website that could be easily viewed by the end-user, whether it was accessed on a smart phone, notebook, iPad or even a desk top PC.

 

The technology that has made this possible is called Responsive Web Design, and in a nutshell, this means that even the most professional and technical of websites can be opened on any device without the end user having to resize, pan or scroll excessively through the site. The information and images should be displayed in exactly the same way regardless of the size of the display on the device you are using to view the site.

 

Using Responsive Web Design when a website is produced protects it against the development of new devices, because the website interface will already adapt to any viewing tool with minimal input from the end-user.

 

As with every investment there are considerations to be made:

 

• Will it be cost effective for your business? If you know that visitors to your website will only ever be accessing it through a PC due to the nature of your business, (it has to be said that this is more and more unlikely) then, if it is not offered as standard, do you need it?
• What content will you be displaying on your website, will it be used for E-commerce or providing information through text and images?
• Should you consider a web app over a more traditional website? If the website can be seen on all devices without a specific app do you really need to have both?

So you can see that by including Responsive Web Design in your website development you will be enabling the next generation of devices to access and display your site with a minimum amount of disruption.