Just Talking About Responsive Web Design Doesn’t Make A Website Development Company Any Good!

Have you heard the proverb ‘a bad workman always blames his tools’? No? But if you have been to a website development agency recently and heard someone from the designing team say that responsive website design is bad, then you have heard it, just in a different form. The truth is responsive web design is good, in fact we think it’s an awesome technique to make really impressive device-agnostic websites that will look just as good on small screen (smartphones & mobiles) as it will look on desktops. The problem is some web developers will advertise responsive website design as their strengths and eventually fail at delivering an acceptable final product. And when they can’t find any good excuse to defend their incompetence, they will blame it on this.

What’s The Standard Excuse And How it is Forced To Become The Villain?

Responsive website design doesn’t tolerate idiots. It depends on expert execution of techniques and tools such as CSS preprocessors, frameworks, user detection agents. When that does not happen, it leads to unnecessary residual files and junk that adds to the file size. A bloated web page will load lethargically – and the blame usually falls on responsive website design as a technique. The actual fault is in the implementation. Owning a powerful gun does not make anyone a good shooter. It is not the culprit here, bad implementation is.

How Do You Get A Good Responsive Website Design Without The Idiocy

When you are choosing a website development company, ask questions that will help you make informed decisions. Don’t ask ‘can you make a responsive website?’, ask ‘what’s the average loading time of your responsive designs?’. An experiment conducted by Forbes in 2016 shows that 1 second pages have more conversion rates compared to 5 second pages. Ideal page size should be less than 2MB at all costs.

Getting a page to load in 1 second in the Indian context is asking too much of the infrastructure, but a 2 seconds page should be your target. Anything more than that, is usually slow. 3 seconds should be your limit! No more than that. Benchmark all your design agencies against the ‘2 seconds page load’ standard. And ask for it, no compromise on that. A perfect responsive website design that loads in 2 or 3 seconds is possible, settling for any less is well – mediocre. (Note: Do not test load times on slow internet speeds! Test it on a high speed broadband internet connection. The load times we mentioned are on high speed broadband connections only.)

Responsive website design is a necessity because most of your visitors/buyers are going to be on smartphones. If fonts and images on your website looks microscopic when seen on a mobile screen you are pretty much asking your mobile phone visitors to leave. So you need a good responsive design, but if it loads slow then again you are sending your visitors away to your competitor’s website that looks good on small screen and loads in a jiffy. Or you can play it the other way around and attract more visitors with a fast loading, nicely designed website – the choice is yours.