Responsive Web Design Birmingham

Looking for Responsive Web Design Birmingham? Then you are in the right place as all of the websites that we create come with responsive web design as standard.

What is Responsive Web Design?

Responsive web design is the art form of getting your website to work seamlessly across desktop, tablet and mobile devices. This includes all the different desktop screen resolutions and all of the various mobile phone devices & screen resolutions.

Responsive web design responds to your users’ behaviour and environment and devices. Using CSS coding in a smart way, responsive web design ensures your website layout adjusts to each devices, carries across consistent core elements and without compatibility issues.

Responsive Web Design is not just a case of resizing elements to fit on a page – as many sites simply do – it’s a whole new way of completely rethinking the way we design for desktop & mobiles.

What is the difference between a standalone mobile website and a responsive website?

5-10 years ago as the mobile boom was starting most websites simply had a completely separate mobile website, which stood on a standalone URL, and typical featured just a very basic template website that bore no resemblance to the companies, branding or desktop website.

Using what is now considered antiqued methods, coding was used to detect mobile visitors and send them to a one size fits all mobile website hosted on a separate url, an example of this would have been www.m.yourdomain.com

This practice was not so great for SEO and thankfully technology has moved on significantly since then to offer a far better SEO friendly way of creating mobile websites and carrying across the look, feel and core features of a desktop website.

With a responsive website no special coding is required to detect and redirect mobile visitors. Instead using pre-defined styles and the luxury of flexibility that we have in coding responsive websites today, websites are able to be coded in such a way that layouts never break, mobile scaled images can be delivered seamlessly and responsive websites scale to fit the screen resolution accordingly without a mismatch in font & image size.

It’s also important to keep in mind that a mobile website is not a mobile app. A mobile is a specially developed app that works seperatly from your website but, may, also have very similar functionality.

As there is no redirecting to a separate mobile website, it is far better for SEO. Google now uses mobile responsive websites as part of its algorithm and ranks websites that are responsive higher in the search results than those that are not mobile responsive.

The benefits of responsive web design

Responsive web design brings with it many benefits and as the technology improves, further benefits & flexibility will also arise.

Previously in the early days when responsive web design was not as flexible web designers would simple design the same website 3 times

Once for desktops

Once for tablets

And once for mobiles

It was, at the time, a far better solution than a single static mobile website and it allowed scaled images to be delivered, however it wasn’t a perfect solution as smart phones became more popular and different screen sized tables and mobile devices became more and more popular.

As technology as moved on and media queries and the use of multiple style sheets has become much easier, responsive website design has also become much more user friendly.

Now we don’t ned to just design for 3 main devices, we can use CSS and media queries to pull & hide only the required content and display it as necessary depending on the screen resolution.

This reduces the need for a standalone URL and helps benefit SEO.

Displaying images and fonts across devices has become a lot easier as we can deliver scaled fonts that size correctly on mobile and also serve mobile specific images rather than scaling down desktop sized images which become unreadable and create a negative and frustrating user experience.

Remember to discuss this with your chosen web developer as SEO is a key part of your project and a responsive web design will certainly help your SEO rankings as well – If you are unsure, speak with an SEO agency.