While it’s common knowledge that smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices are gaining in popularity, the actual statistics may come as a surprise.
Currently, more than 60% of all Internet connections take place on a mobile device – meaning mobile activity has actually surpassed desktop activity, and the number of mobile devices is still growing, according to Holly Biondo, marketing coordinator for Net Driven.
Responsive Design Basics
Simply put, responsive Web design is a way of building websites that automatically scale and organize themselves in order to fit the device that is being used to view them.
“The website will scale itself to size in order to provide the best user experience, both visually and functionally,” Biondo explains. “It isn’t so much a single technology as it is a set of different techniques that, when combined, make this type of design possible.”
The first known website to offer responsive design was Audi.com back in 2001, according to Mike Giblin, president of U.S. operations for Kukui. He adds that it wasn’t until earlier in 2015 that the concept of responsive design became more important. In April, Google began boosting “mobile-friendly” websites in its search results.
“A responsive website will normally qualify as a type of ‘mobile-friendly’ website, according to Google’s standards,” Giblin says. “That means that a responsive website will appear higher in the mobile search results on Google, giving your website an edge with search engine optimization (SEO).”
Biondo adds that while mobile searches make up more than 60% of all Internet searches, Google accounts for roughly 67% of all Internet searches – meaning, “when it comes to SEO, what Google says pretty much goes.”