Responsive design websites are the latest trend in website presentation technology. These types of web sites utilize CSS3 (cascading style sheets version 3) and a new feature called ‘media queries’, which is recognized by all modern browsers and almost all smart phones and mobile devices produced in the last 4 or 5 years.
In a nutshell:
Responsive Design = Fluid Design = Adaptive Design
Responsive Design Website = Mobile Ready Website
The approach is that one website is designed to work with all viewing devices. When viewing the site with a desktop monitor, the site appears pretty much the same as you would expect, but when the site is viewed with a cell phone or tablet with a smaller viewing area (measured in pixels), rather than compressing the site down to a miniature size to fit the smaller screen, the fluid design allows the site design to flow and reconfigure itself for the size of the displaying device. This allows buttons, links and text to remain readable.
With this technology, a website senses the screen dimensions for the viewing device a visitor is using. Page elements, such as text, images and buttons, retain a fairly large size for easy viewing and operation, and are only re-sized when necessary to retain view-ability. All page elements are still there, but are rearranged for easy viewing–or we can remove certain elements for smaller devices such as smart phones if you wish to simplify those designs.
Why Consider a Responsive Design Website?
The four best reasons are:
- You only have to maintain one website where all of your products, services and information are stored. This eliminates the time and expense required to maintain multiple websites.
- Today, about 25% of your visitors are using mobile devices. In about two years that percentage will be 50% or more.
- Google and other search engines have already advocated responsive design websites. Quite frankly, Google’s motives are self-serving. Over the past couple of years they have been aggressively removing sites from the search results. One site is much easier to spider and analyze than multiple sites. Plus, they also say that mobile-friendly web sites will be given an advantage in Google searches utilizing mobile devices.
- We use WordPress exclusively for the sites we build. WordPress is considered to be the most search engine friendly website platform with over 73 million installations worldwide. WordPress is easy to learn and easy to manage. This means you no longer need to pay a designer or developer to make changes or updates to your site.