Responsive Design: What It Is And Why You Should Care.
Below is a Guest Blog from Joe Dawson that provides an overview on Responsive Web Design.
It’s clear at this point that if you don’t attract and interact with mobile users as part of your web marketing strategy, you do so at your own peril. Traffic from tablets and smartphones account for a quarter of traffic to many news sites and blogs. This generation of web traffic especially happens if you update your content frequently and have an online following. It is crucial that your website is mobile-friendly. Part of this process might be making your site easier to manipulate with swipes and finger taps instead of clicks. Optimizing the layout of your site also involves a fairly new web design principle called ‘responsive design.’
Responsive design is building or rebuilding a website so that users can view and interact easily with your site no matter what size screen they use. Generally speaking this means you don’t have to use one site for computer screens and another for mobile devices. This provides users on any platform to privilege to customize their viewing experience. Websites designed with responsive design incorporate ‘media queries,’ bits of software that try to determine what type of device the visitor is using.
Responsively designed websites resize differently than websites designed strictly for computer viewers. When all web pages were viewed on computer screens, designers made pages with rigid grid-like formats. Thoughtful designers made it so that you could make text bigger or smaller. Other than that, if you changed the size of a window or viewed it on a device that wasn’t a standard computer monitor, all you got was a chopped-off view of the page.
By Joe Dawson
Smartphones and tablets have advanced to the point where they can handle downloading full web pages instead of stripped-down ‘mobile’ versions of them. If sites are designed with full-size and tiny screens in mind, they can work in any browser, on any size screen.Take a look at the news site Mashable.com. Resize it. Try making it super skinny, then ultra-wide and everything in between. It looks good no matter what size it is, right?
By Joe Dawson
Instead of an inflexible grid for framework with text, titles, and pictures all locked in proportions, responsively designed sites have units that are much more fluid, blocks of text that stays together but can be resized, pictures that can fluctuate in dimensions, move around the page, and disappear according to the size of the browser.
One hurdle for designers making responsive websites is incorporating video players. Responsiveness is harder to apply to videos embedded in pages since players are much less flexible in terms of resizing than images. The other main obstacle to making a page with responsive design is the initial investment it takes to do so. It is difficult to ‘retrofit’ an existing website with responsive design, usually you must rebuild your site.
And if website owners can afford to, they should make the jump to responsive design as soon as possible. Tablets are on pace to outsell laptops sometime between this year and 2016, and having a mobile-ready site now puts you on track for future success.
Joe Dawson works and blogs for PrintingPeach.ca. They are a Canadian customer-service focused business that specializes in printing and web design/marketing.
Read Adventure Web Productions’ article The Advantages of Responsive Web Design for more information on the benefits of Responsive Web Design.
Adventure Web Productions’ responsive web design will provide your potential customers and clients alike optimal viewing across multiple technology gadgets and screen sizes using one code base. It’s simple to use and consistently accessible to all.
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