Responsive design technology is all a buzz at the moment. Leading the way are sites like Foxtons, who are taking advantage of the changing browsing habits of the nation to ensure maximum exposure and the very best customer experience for the properties that they market.
For those who don’t know, Responsive Web Design (RWD) is an approach to web design aimed at building sites to provide an optimal viewing experience for end users.
This will (or should if done properly) allow easy reading and navigation along with a minimum of the end user being able to pan, scroll and resize – across a wide range of devices.
Responsive design has been around for a while, and now that it has been proven, tried and tested, it will become a lot more prevalent.
The methodology behind RWD is somewhat different to traditional web design; it is often referred to as ‘Mobile First’ technology, and suggested practice is to create the basic form of the website, and enhance it for smart phones, tablets and PCs – as opposed to giving birth to an image-heavy, complex and clunky website that will ‘look all right’ on basic mobile phones.
One current hurdle with RWD is that banner advertisements and videos are not as fluid as they perhaps could be; this is due to the compatibility with video players on mobile devices.
In today’s technologically enhanced world, it is often difficult to fathom which new technologies are going to stay current: there was a time when the Minidisc or latterly the good old Nokia phone were extremely advanced! Personally, I still love my Filofax.
There are often new technologies or fads that become popular, but dwindle just as quickly as they have soared to the forefront. I would strongly suggest that responsive design is not one of these ‘fads’ and is here to stay for the foreseeable future.
I have recently been privy to an interesting set of statistics which stated that a particular national property portal has over 100,000 hits on their website by mobile devices at around 7pm.
In actual fact, you could see quite clearly the trends in browsing relating to family trends – being desktop in the day, then mobile phone on the journey home and then whilst sitting watching television with family, the tablet device.
With 99% of tenants and buyers coming from portal activity, the relevance of responsive design in the real world becomes not just relevant but absolutely critical.
In the current market, many agents are understandably putting most focus into attracting sellers and landlords, and activity on our client platform (Scorpio) is almost identically reflected, showing that the target market are also very much using the evening peace to interact with their agencies and that any agent not ‘responding’ to this either with RWD or specific mobile apps is missing out on a huge opportunity.
In summary, it looks as though Responsive Web Design, mobile apps and now the client portal, have been actively deployed in agency for the most part of 2013 and are being more widely used by the day.
If the likes of Disney, Harvard University, Starbucks, Sony, TIME Magazine, Microsoft Surface and BBC One are using it, then it can’t be wrong, surely?
Peter Grant runs property software company VTUK
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