Convenience is the ultimate business niche, to say ‘we can tailor to your personal needs’ is what everyone wants to hear; so when we login to a website to buy our beloved mothers a gift or two for Mothering Sunday: we want to ensure that we can see the jewellery, chocolates or flowers clearly. We also want to make sure there’s no awkward pinching and scrolling so we can see the price, product and review on our portable devices without too much hassle. We call an adaptable website capable doing this ‘responsive‘.
True Story
So I have my smartphone, my tablet and my laptop. I’m out and about, I want to buy some roses. I don’t want to use my laptop and my tablet is cumbersome. I want to use my smartphone. But! The website is not compatible with mobiles, the screen doesn’t fit and the interface is frustrating; to cut a long story short, I’m going to a different website and this business lost my custom.
A worrying statistic for non-compatible websites say that customers are five times more likely to neglect an attempted transaction they’re trying if the site isn’t responsive to mobile devices and are 79% are more likely to attempt a different site from the search engine’s results. One site reports an ideal mobile responsive site (according to customers) has the following aspects: the page loads in 5 seconds or less; large and colourful buttons; limited scrolling and pinching; speedy access to the ‘contact us’ section; quick ability to phone customer service and the ability to locate staff member’s social media profiles.
This is how we do it.
Cardstream’s Payment Gateway is completely responsive, the screenshot we have here is the exact same webpage one would visit on any other device, and it merely re-formats itself according to the size of the devices screen and displays the interface in the most accommodating manner possible. The possible problem with producing (for example) a mobile website and a desktop website, is you have double the amount of maintenance to perform and great care must be taken to ensure consistency and symmetry between the two website’s information. Responsive websites are a great way to keep things tidy, consistent (which reflects well on the business) and flexible in application; with your transactions, if you don’t use it- you could lose it!
As always, for further reading, please visit these links:
http://www.webstarsltd.com/blog/why-responsive-web-design-is-important
https://blog.kissmetrics.com/mobile-mania/
http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/study/2208496/72-of-consumers-want-mobilefriendly-sites-google-research
