Surely you have seen people glued to their smartphone screen while walking across the street or out at dinner.

But how does business insert itself into such familiar scenarios, knowing today there are literally more smartphones than toothbrushes in the world?

First consider your website. How will yours look on a smartphone or tablet? If you are expecting people to just “pinch and spread” your website while they are viewing it on a phone, you will rapidly lose mobile visitors. There’s only so much dragging and tapping and flicking a person can endure.

If your business targets people on the move, such as retailers, restaurants, dry cleaners, Realtors do, you just have to do better.

There are two ways to ensure that the experience of viewing your website on a smaller device is more pleasing. You may have heard of the two terms for this: Responsive Web Design (RWD) and Mobile. These are two markedly different approaches.

In creating a responsive website, you basically make your “big” website – your desktop website – adapt to the frame of whatever device a person is viewing.

With this approach, the site and its content will transform to match the width of the web browser used to view it. This allows the website to be viewed in an optimal way on every device from smartphones all the way up to large computer monitors. Since the site is programmed to conform to the device, horizontal scrolling never is required. Neither are panning or pinching to zoom as they are when viewing fixed-width websites on small devices. Buttons will be the right size to tap on small devices, etc.

Responsive web design senses the dimensions of the available screen and morphs into that receiving shape. There’s no more pinching and pulling. Everything is essentially visible from the start.

Still the content is “linearized” so that all people have to do is scroll down.

However, when people are on the fly, they don’t necessarily want to scroll down on a pre-squeezed page to read the deep content. They really just want the facts, ma’am.

Read More (Source: Laurie Macomber, Northern Colorado Business Report)