New Media Innovation

Responsive design is the hot topic for 2013. We’ve moved beyond mobile and finally reached the point where companies are accepting the fact that the best ROI comes from fully integrated marketing programs. It’s hard to fully integrate when your website is a convoluted mess of versions for different devices or worse, a single version that renders poorly on different devices.

The case for responsive design has been made clear, and responsive web design even made it onto the ecommerce marketing checklist for 2013. However, companies are still slow to invest the time and money into the development required to turn their antiquated websites into responsive websites that render perfectly no matter what device a person is using.

It’s important to understand that having a mobile version of your website isn’t enough anymore. Responsive websites simplify internet marketing and SEO. Instead of having to develop and manage content for multiple websites, businesses with responsive sites can take a unified approach to content management because they have only the one responsive site to manage. The same applies to analytics and strategy development and deployment. A responsive website means there is only one set of analytics to examine and a single strategy to develop and deploy.

In addition, responsive websites are easier for consumers to find than traditional or mobile sites because they come up higher in search engines’ rankings. In fact, Google recommends responsive web design because having a single URL for desktop and mobile sites makes it easier for Google to discover content and for Google’s algorithms to assign indexing properties to content.

Responsive Design in the Future

Keep in mind, responsive design is still in its infancy, and the future looks extremely bright. “There are a lot of exciting things coming up with responsive design,” Resnick says. “We’re already using elements of responsive design in web applications, and our developers are exploring emerging areas of responsive design by testing a multitude of integrations that are now available.”

Resnick predicts, “As the internet transforms further into a platform of services and user interfaces that tie those services together, leveraging this technology in the future will allow companies to integrate a plethora of back-end services, such as Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce.com, and Amazon Web Services, and then present the integrated data back out the front-end iad layer on a responsive design so the application looks great on all devices without custom coding needed for each device or screen size. No longer are expensive back-end solutions needed to integrate legacy systems with business partners.”

One thing is certain, you don’t want to fall behind and watch your competitors launch responsive websites while yours is still stuck in 2010 (or earlier). The time to get responsive with your web design is now.