The term “responsive web design” refers to websites that change and adapt their appearance for optimal display on all screen sizes, tablets, smartphones, ipods, kindles, and desktop and laptop computer screens. From time to time, in the digital arts industry, it is called “fluid design”, “adaptive website design” or “RWD”. Unresponsive websites don’t change to accommodate different screen sizes, which means they can be difficult to navigate and view on smaller devices.
Desktop computer sales have already been overtaken by mobile sales, and most digital media education sources predict that mobile web use will overtake desktop computer use in 2014. So it seems logical may desktop computer search soon be overtaken by mobile search too. Sixty percent of web users say they would be more inclined to buy from mobile-optimized websites. Therefore, companies that rely on SEO would make perfect sense to start moving towards mobile-optimized sites and responsive site designs specifically. Especially since Google’s new algorithm updates now deprecate separate mobile-only sites. Like the ones with a.mobi in the URL. Increasingly, new websites are being created using responsive design methods to eradicate the requirement for independent mobile websites. Furthermore, this decision dramatically improves the user experience. This leads to more customer interaction and sales, as potential customers are not alienated by small text and difficult navigation.
For responsive layouts to work, a media query is used to determine the size of the screen from which the site is accessed. The script can detect all devices, be it tablets, laptops or smartphones. Then use CSS to render the website in a proper format. Images can be resized accordingly to fit on smaller screens. Text grows larger and menus can change to a variety of different dropdown formats, unlike the mostly standard horizontal display.
The benefits of using this type of layout, compared to setting up a mobile version of your website that is completely independent from your original site, are obvious. Whenever you update your website, it will update for each device and display correctly on all screens. You only have to update in one location, where with a separate mobile site it would require a separate location that would also require updating. Often times, your websites will be accessed from a tablet. If you have two separate sites, a mobile version and a desktop version, anyone can guess which version of the site will be seen by tablet users. With a responsive design, you can (mostly) control what will be seen on each screen size.
Various companies offer both fluid design and mobile design for websites. However, RWD methods are constantly improving, so it doesn’t seem to make much sense to have a separate mobile website. The only time you might want a separate site would be if you prefer to advertise differently to laptop or desktop users, compared to the way you would.
to mobile users. For example, a fast food company might want to target people on the go with an instant special offer, but show off its upcoming promotions and menu to laptop users. However, in many cases, a website will serve all users identically, so a responsive design is the preferred option.
In a fast approaching future, all websites should have responsive layouts, as users will expect. Therefore, in a couple of years, companies that build unresponsive websites will have to pay for a new site to compensate their users for the lack of their website. Consequently, before starting any new website design project, it would be wise to learn more about the cost and benefits of responsive designs.