Chip Web Design creates responsive websites as standard at no extra cost to our clients. This is a decision we took to improve our service when the benefits of this suit your requirements.

So what is responsive website design and why have we decided to do this as a standard service?

Responsive Web Design – What is it

For once the IT industry has come up with a pretty good descriptive name. Ever since Mobile web browsing started and more recently the introduction of tablets web designers have had a decision to make about how a website looks on your nice big laptop screen or monitor and then on a very small in comparison mobile screen. Add to that the multitude of different tablet screen sizes and making a web page look good on all these becomes a challenge.

In the early days when we just had mobile and big monitor screens to worry about the preferred solution was to create a separate mobile version of the website. This has it’s downsides though and following the introduction of tablets with bigger screens no longer meets all the requirements.

So the answer is to use responsive web design. The web page dynamically changes to fit the screen size accessing it. So the menu of a web page may change on a mobile screen so that it fits nicely and is still easily useable. Images shrink with the size of the screen or disappear altogether to allow pages to load quicker. Columns of information drop from two or three column layouts into one column layouts so the information is bigger and easier to read.

Compare this website on a mobile, tablet and laptop and you will see how it changes to suit each device. That is responsive web design.

Responsive Web Design – Why Now

Statistics show that mobile and tablet usage is now over 50% of people that will visit your website. This figure will only increase as it becomes more affordable to buy these devices and more people choose to buy a tablet rather than a laptop or pc.

Chip Web Design have therefore taken the decision that the time is now right to ensure that all our sites are designed to look equally great on all the devices out there.

Responsive Web Design Benefits

Responsive web design comes with many benefits.

• The main plus point is usability. With responsive design being flexible to all screens it makes your site easy to access and use.
• Responsive web design is much easier to maintain compared to having multiple versions of one site to suit mobile, tablet and pc. It is one site, web designers are not editing multiple versions everytime you need to make an update or change. This means less of our time and cheaper for you.
• There are SEO benefits and cost savings. Site indexing of your site is much better with a single version of your site making it nice and easy for Google.

Responsive Web Design Disadvantages

There are always some disadvantages but we do not think these are that bad.

• Loading time can be affected with the browser downloading a lot of css code that it will not use. Image resizing can also affect loading times, however the decision could be taken to not include certain images on some screen sizes to speed up load time.
• Development time for us takes longer but we will not charge you more so there is always a silver lining.

If you would like to discuss responsive web design and how it can help your business feel free to get in touch with us.