Device fragmentation has become one of the biggest challenges to marketing and branding today. Let’s say you’ve just invested in a brand new website. Months were spent on the design, picking just the right color palette, incorporating your logo, making sure the font looks just right, and even obsessing over the spacing. It’s beautiful, and it’s the perfect representation of your brand right now. Except you go to load it on your tablet, and suddenly it’s a bit squished and the bottom’s been cut off. Not so perfect. Then you grab your smartphone. Now it’s a mess – all you can see is half the logo, and you’re scrolling around trying to get to anything else. That perfect representation of your brand is nowhere to be found.
But maybe you saw this coming. You knew how many people would access your services from your mobiles, so you did the smart thing: you spent twice as much so that you could develop a separate mobile site, perfectly optimized for smartphones. Brilliant. Except now your mobile desktop sites look completely different – so much for maintaining the same brand standards across both sites. And just to rub it in, it looks great on one phone, but just that little bit different on another. And what about tablets? Which site should they load? Should there be a third, tablet-specific site? Now you’re even further away from brand consistency. You’re looking at three separate sites with different designs, different functionality, and different feels, and you still have plenty of devices that aren’t quite displaying any of them right. Something’s gone wrong.
As you might have guessed by now, there’s a better way. A way to develop and design one website, with consistent a design and interface across every device, and perfectly optimized no matter what screen it loads up on: responsive design. Responsive web design uses the latest web technologies to create a dynamic website that adjusts to fit whatever device loads it up. You control how your site’s design will adjust to different device sizes, adjusting image sizing and position, which text appears where, and more. But it’s still the same site on every device, with the same color palette, the same content, and the same functionality. Your logo no longer expands off the side of the screen, you set it to fit perfectly. Your branding is saved, and you have total control over what your website says about your brand to every single visitor.
This flexibility carries with it a few other advantages too. Not only are you covered for every device out there, you’re covered for all the devices that haven’t even hit the market yet – meaning no more redesigns whenever a new technology makes it big. The fact that you’re only building one site not only saves you development costs, it saves you headaches down the road too – now you only have to update your content on one site, rather than tackling each one in turn. Plus, all of the benefits of your digital marketing strategy are concentrated on one site, not spread thinly between a few.
Responsive web design saves you money, saves you work, and saves your brand. Device fragmentation is a problem of the past – your brand can now look just the way you want it to on every device out there, from a smartphone to a 60″ display. Your brand is the most valuable commodity that you have, so don’t let a tiny smartphone display ruin it for you. Take control of how your customers see your company and give responsive web design a go.
