Is Responsive Website Designing worth it?

“Day by day, the number of devices, platforms, and browsers that need to work with your site grows. Responsive web design represents a fundamental shift in how we’ll build websites for the decade to come.” – Jeffrey Veen.

It’s true that the progression in technology is leading to newer and better devices, platforms and browsers and this fires up the need for a change in the website designing so that the websites can adapt according to the new devices as quickly and efficiently as possible. Here Responsive Website Designing (RWD) comes into play and addresses the challenge associated with flexible site design according to the device size.

What is Responsive Website Designing?

RWD is a way of designing a website in such a way that it adapts itself for proper visibility in any device of any size, including desktop monitor, laptop, tablet or any smartphone. Through it, a website’s complete layout, including its content and images adapt or become responsive to differently sized display screens, with proper display, readability and navigation.

The websites are made responsive by using a designing tool- CSS3’s (Cascading Style Sheets 3) media queries and fluid proportion based grids and other components.

Why is Responsive Website Designing required?

There has been a marked increase in the number of visitors accessing various sites through their smartphones. Smartphone and tablet traffic is gaining an edge over traditional desktop traffic (as is visible from the image*). That’s why, RWD is the order of the day and is therefore gaining popularity and acceptance with each passing day.

A Quick Comparison between advantages and disadvantages of Responsive Website Designing:

PROS	CONS
Viewers are able to see your proper website and not its distorted version on any device. So, they can surf your site even on the move.	The responsive website on mobile changes the standard look and feel of the website, like differently placed navigation and sidebars, which is irritating for most users. Also, when the size of the site is reduced, there is an increase in the number of columns. So, the user spends much more time in scrolling.
Developing a responsive site is cheaper than developing a mobile site from the scratch.	Responsive web designing is more time consuming and costlier than the non-responsive designing.
As one design fits all sizes, there’s no load on the resources to manage both normal and mobile version of the same website.	For businesses with low mobile traffic, spending time and money on making their site mobile friendly is a sheer wastage of both.
Responsive designing not only makes the website fit into mobiles, but it also ensures that the functionalities remain the same i.e. all clickable things remain clickable.	The advanced mobile devices are developed to display even the non-responsive websites effectively, thereby crushing the main purpose of responsive design.
The maintenance of the site is easier as web designers and web developers need to work only with a single URL set and single CSS code set in responsive designing.	Responsive sites take more time to load because of the restrictive mobile internet speed. Designers also need to take into account the graphical content in the mobile version as more graphics means an increased loading time.
With single code and URL, any updation becomes easier and all the users are able to access updated data irrespective of the device they are using.
One URL set means all the links point to a single domain, so responsive sites also get SEO benefits. Google itself recommends responsive web designing._#

As is visible from the comparison above, the pros of responsive website design far outweigh the cons of it. Now is it necessary for you or not totally depends upon who your customers are and what you wish to offer them.

If you have considerable mobile traffic and want your customer to navigate your website seamlessly on any device of any size and anywhere on the go, then respond to his needs and use Responsive Website Design for your site.

SOURCE:
* http://www.smartinsights.com/mobile-marketing/mobile-marketing-analytics/mobile-marketing-statistics/
# https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/feature-phones