Your Web presence is often the first stop for parents and prospective students looking for the right educational institution. An engaging, informative website is key to capturing their attention.

There’s a lot of jargon floating around in cyberspace and Responsive Web Design (RWD) is one of the most common.

But what is RWD and should your educational institution care about it?

As your partners in your technology journey, we at DigiGro want to cut through the jargon, so let’s address RWD and what it means for you.

Simply put, RWD means designing a website so it works equally well when viewed on a desktop, laptop, tablet or mobile device.

As many as fifty percent of Internet users are on mobile devices these days, and that number is only going to rise. As an educational institution building your online persona, you want to ensure that your online presence is unique enough to attract visitors and friendly enough that they stay engaged.

Here are six reasons why a responsive website is important for educational institutions.

Ease of navigation

Campus life is busy and complex. Your educational institution has a lot of information to communicate. You want to make it easy for visitors to find what they need.

RWD makes the experience of navigating your website feel familiar regardless of the visitor’s device.

Your website adjusts itself to fit the screen it’s being viewed on. Links always work. Text and navigation are big enough to read in comfort. Images aren’t disproportionately large or small. Scrolling through is smooth. And when the visitor switches from one device to another, there’s a reassuring sense of familiarity.

Better Google Search rankings

In April 2015, Google began to rank responsive websites higher in its search results. Your website is intended to take your institution’s story to a larger audience of parents and prospective students, and for that they first need to find you. RWD automatically gets your website a higher ranking and a more prominent place in the Google search results for great schools, colleges and universities.

Save money, save time

As mobile Internet use began to grow, some institutions that already had websites (known as “static” sites) began building separate ones for mobile compatibility. This meant that school staff were managing two websites, updating them with the same content, and occasionally finding that one or the other was outdated or worse, held incorrect information.

You are focused on the all-important job of educating young minds. Why spend time, energy and money on maintaining multiple digital footprints? Your reputation is the cornerstone of your success, and one small miss on content may cause disproportionate reputational damage in this age of social media and constant scrutiny.

Even if you do keep your static and mobile sites in sync, Google’s algorithms interpret duplicate content as spam and may push your website lower in search results.

Being future-ready

Education has many objectives, and one of the most important is to prepare young people for the future. RWD shares that objective. Technology can change in the blink of an eye, but a responsive website is by definition fluid and flexible: it can adapt to whatever the next generation of technology brings without a large financial outlay by your institution.

Accessibility and inclusiveness

Because RWD is all about adaptability, it accommodates students and parents with special needs. For example, many countries now require websites to support Internet users who are visually impaired. Your responsive website makes this possible by simplifying magnification and reducing the amount of zooming needed. It’s important to note that responsiveness isn’t the same as accessibility, but they are closely related.

Competition

Computer access is limited in India, but mobile penetration is near universal. Without a responsive website, you may not be reaching talented students only because they lack easy access to the right computing equipment. It’s harder for parents, students and staff to stay in touch. Your institution’s story isn’t being told as loudly as it deserves to be. And competing institutions that are ahead of the education technology curve garner more attention.

DigiGro specialises in responsive web design

We provide technology solutions to educational institutions like yours and we know how critical RWD is to your continued success. That’s why RWD is one of our fundamental design principles.

Talk to us about how we can help your institution’s website transform for the future.