No matter how big or small your business, your online presence is a driving force behind your sales. It doesn’t matter if you’re a masseur or provide the best luxury contracting services in the Northeast. Customers want to find you online, see testimonials, shoot you an email and basically get a preview of what they might be in for. It’s not just your job to provide quality services or products—it’s also your job to make it easy for potential customers to learn about you on the device of their choice.
If you’ve never heard of responsive design (RD) before, or aren’t quite sure what it means, it’s pretty simple. “Responsive design” is a way of designing your website so that it responds in the right way no matter which device a person is using. For example, your website should be attractive and easy to navigate whether a person is using a laptop, pad, or other device. But you don’t know how to do that. This is where it gets tricky.
The Fickle Nature of Consumers
There are many avenues to ensure responsive design. There are tools, sites and apps to test for RD. Some web designers even collect as many devices as possible for an old school approach to testing. However, with new gadgets getting released all the time, it can be impossible to keep up. How many customers are you losing because your site doesn’t work well when an out of date version of Firefox is being used on a specific iPhone generation?
The unfortunate answer is you just don’t know how many sales, contracts and long-term customers you’re losing. You’ve probably gone to a website before on your tablet or smartphone and it just doesn’t work. The images don’t load, you can’t make sense of the content all over the place—and you probably quickly went elsewhere for what you needed. Your customers are doing the exact same thing because loyalty has to be earned.
The Importance of a Pro
As a business owner, you’re not expected to know the ins and outs of responsive design. Why should you be scouring the technology news for the latest platforms and then immediately testing your online presence on them from your company website to your blog? That takes a lot of time, effort and techie knowledge. A great professional website designer knows responsive design, tests for it, addresses any glitches right away and keeps you ahead of the curve.
Lacking responsive design is worse than not having an online presence at all on certain platforms. After all, “bad web presence” (or presence that’s perceived that way because of an RD problem) is even more harmful than no presence. You can’t expect your audience to understand that responsive design is to blame for an ugly website. They’re going to blame you and might assume you’re unprofessional, don’t care about how you’re perceived and in turn don’t care about your customers.
Your Digital First Impression
If your web presence isn’t flawless on every platform, you’re making a bad first impression and those are nearly impossible to undo. Consumers deserve a user-friendly, beautiful website the first time around. If you don’t deliver what they want, someone else will. You might think you’re saving money by taking a DIY website design approach, but just because the site looks great to you doesn’t mean it does on Internet Explorer, the latest Nokia phone or a cranky old desktop.
You have one chance to make a digital first impression, and responsive design is critical. Make sure it’s part of your plan by depending on a designer with the skills and persistence to make it happen.