With so many different devices, and viewing experiences, making sure your website looks good to prospective clients, regardless of how they reach it is imperative to making a good impression. According to a report done in 2015, there are over 24000 distinct internet ready devices, devices that a person could be using to view your website. Devices that differ in many ways, including view-able screen size and web browsers. Differences that might cause a site that looks great on one device to look unprofessional and lacking on another. Further, Google and other search engines have been taking the look, usability, and user experience of a website into consideration when determining where a website ranks within their search results. Matters are further complicated by the wide selection of internet browsers on the various devices that might be employed to do the actual browsing of your site. What works for, and looks good with one browser/device combination could very easily display inaccurately, work incorrectly, or perhaps not even work at all with another browser. So, with so many possible iterations, how does one help ensure that their website looks good to the maximum number of prospective clients ... by making sure their website employs a responsive design.
Responsive Design is a way to design a website so that it's design is fluid. A design that is able to flow and adapt depending upon the size of the viewing environment. Elements comprising a responsively designed website are able to re-arrange, resize, and otherwise adjust to make one's viewing experience better. With a responsive design, text font sizes automatically adapt, becoming bigger and easier to read on smaller screen sizes. Images might resize to take up a larger section of the screen so that they can be viewed with ease. Links, buttons, and other interactive elements on a page might make sure they are easier to be clicked, by becoming bigger and/or adding some padding around themselves to reduce the change of a user clicking on a nearby element accidentally.
Ensuring that your site's design is responsive is not only a wise business decision, but every day is becoming more and more a necessity in competing in today's online marketplace.