It’s just about the end of the year, and that means that it’s a time to take a look back and also a look forward, to assess how you have been doing with your business and personal goals, as well as whether you’re properly poised to tackle those goals in the year ahead.

You’ll find no shortage of resources online to help you make your year-end retrospective a comprehensive one. And these should be of great value as you consider the trends, challenges, and demands that you might have missed, or might have to anticipate in the near future.

If your retrospective includes a look back at how small business web design services and web marketing strategies have affected the performance of your business, you might be well served by taking a look back at this very blog, provided you haven’t already read all of its posts and the associated links.

If you’re all caught up, we’ve got a new link to bring to your attention, as just one example of the countless articles that are emerging about what 2016 will mean for the industry of web design and development in Charlotte, NC and all other IT hubs in the US.

The Next Web published an article this week that drew attention to the growing prevalence of “responsive web design,” which has become an indispensable part of small business web design services for all companies with a reasonably diverse client base. The growth of this trend reflects the fact that mobile web browsing has become more popular than desktop browsing, even though some people are still slavishly devoted to the latter.

This diversity is something that businesses need to tap into if they don’t want to lose sales leads among people who tend to shop from the comfort of their home computer, or from people who comparison shop on their mobile phones while in stores or otherwise on the go, or from people who simply tend to use devices that your web design and development agency didn’t have in mind when they designed your website.

In fact, responsive web design is perhaps the primary trend that you can use to assess the viability of your existing small business web design services as you make the transition from 2015 to 2016. If it’s a trend they didn’t consider or bring to your attention when they designed your site within the past year or two, that is cause for suspicion. If it’s something that can’t handle once you’ve brought it up to them, that is cause for bringing an end to your contract.

The Next Web describes responsive web design in more detail, but suffice it to say that your website should be equally viewable on any web-enabled device under the sun. If you’ve never done so, have some friends access your site on their phones and tablets and computers and find out if any of them had problems. If they did, imagine other users of those same devices being unable to access your site and abandoning your business before they ever had a chance to become customers. And then recognize that “responsive web design” is the first phrase you’ll have to speak to your new web redesign and development agency in the New Year.