Responsive Website Design

Responsive website design is the new must.  If you are planning on a new website, make sure it is responsive.

Ever since that forbidden fruit launched their phone product the game for websites has continuously changed.  Before even if users had a smartphone they were hardly utilized for browsing the internet.  Now with LTE, 4g getting into most peoples hands browsing on the smartphone is the next popular browser.  How does your website browse on a smartphone there are very good methodologies that have been out for a few years now.  It is time all websites truly move to being available on all screens.

In a nutshell responsive website design is about utilizing media queries and having them adjust to the situation or should we say visualization of the end user.  Pictures work in uniquely different ways by applying a little nifty code to them, the old way was we thought that whatever the user uploaded was the exact proportions that was intended and to touch this would be detrimental.  Luckily we now have an audience of people that adhere to best practice.  This rules out these silly notions of how things are supposed to be.  Now you put the image up to it biggest intended intent.  Any screen smaller will shrink it appropriately to its size keeping its width and height proportions without distorting them.  As web designers we still cannot go all willy nilly over the internet and take a photo straight from that new digital camera.  A downfall of image resizing is that it does require more processor power, so if you are posting huge images within the code end users might not be that happy.

Responsive website design has the opposite of the conundrum and that is that screens are no longer an average of 17 inches.  Any time an upgrade is purchased they are getting bigger and bigger which brings us developers to an even funner challenge.  How can we take advantage of that space so the user can receive more information without being overwhelmed.

Some excellent incentive for responsive website design are it keeps branding nice and tidy as you do not have to maintain multiple sites for multiple devices.  This leads to very easy updates that need to be done once and you won’t have your team forgetting to update other areas.  If you work on your SEO this is also done in one place and you can put all efforts into one page.  Hosting is one place, thus all your redirects are in one place also.  If you have  logins you don’t have to worry about having them across platforms.  You have automatically widened your audience gaining traffic and you ensure a uniform experience if they find you on their phone and then go home and pull you up on their home computer or office computer.

Responsive website design is the new standard.  My advice is to adapt or get old. I easily see this technology for a long shelf life.

While responsive website design is a great solution for content.  I do think there is a very viable place for apps and a balance will continue to be seen.

A Summation for Responsive website design:

Fluid Layout your website can be viewed on all devices.

The Best reason it fulfills user experience – go from the pad to the computer

It will last alot longer than alternative practices

Users viewing your site on mobile device will stay longer thus achieving goals you have for your website

Text and images are automatically formatted to every device

You only need to maintain and manage one website

If an application can be built it will work on every platform of phone

It is social friendly

Well duh, Google recommends it. Whatever they say I do (at least for now)

-By Brandon Roach