Have a website for your desktop, one for mobile? An app perhaps? The digital world is changing; and fast.

Responsive design is the hot topic for 2015. We’ve moved beyond mobile and finally reached the point where companies are accepting the fact that the best ROI comes from fully integrated marketing programs. It’s hard to fully integrate when your website is a convoluted mess of versions for different devices or worse, a single version that renders poorly on different devices.

The case for responsive design has been made clear on numerous occasions by many people and many institutions, nowhere is this clearer than when Google started to heavily push the fact that your website will be down ranked should it not be of responsive design.

However, companies are still slow to invest the time and/or money into the development required to turn their antiquated websites into responsive websites that render perfectly no matter what device a person is using.

With a responsive website, businesses can be in front of consumers at every step of their online journey. People who search for a business’ site, begin reading content and viewing videos from their desktop computers at work, and then look for the same business on their smartphones during lunch are able to continue their research into products and services uninterrupted.

In contrast, if the business has a traditional website and a mobile site, someone investigating products and services online can become frustrated by the lack of complete content on the mobile site or the inability to navigate through the full site on their smartphone. They may even give up the search altogether!

Responsive websites provide continuity between different viewing contexts, remaining completely agnostic to the type of device used and the size of the screen it has. What this means is that the same website will present an optimized layout regardless of which device it finds itself being loaded in.”

It’s important to understand that merely having a mobile version of your website isn’t enough anymore.

Instead of having to develop and manage content for multiple websites, businesses with responsive sites can take a unified approach to content management because they have only the one responsive site to manage. The same applies to analytics and strategy development and deployment. A responsive website means there is only one set of analytics to examine and a single strategy to develop and deploy.

In addition, responsive websites are easier for consumers to find than traditional or mobile sites because they come up higher in search engines’ rankings. In fact, as mentioned earlier, Google recommends responsive web design because having a single URL for desktop and mobile sites makes it easier for Google to discover content and for Google’s algorithms to assign indexing properties to content.