What Is Responsive Design?
Have you heard about Responsive Design? Do you know what it is? First and foremost, Bull & Company creates all of our client’s sites using responsive design. It’s the standard. We don’t even offer it as an option. We used to, but it’s now the standard when building a website. That being stated, what is it?
Responsive design gives the ability of 1 website to work on all mobile devices (smartphones & tablets) and computers using the same site and code. It also gives the user the ability to NOT have the user have scroll right and left, resize the page, and have the navigation nearly impossible to use on mobile devices. In the old days (just a few years ago, but in Internet time that was forever ago!) we used to build two websites: 1 for mobile and 1 standard HTML site for desktops/laptop computers. Furthermore, the mobile build was only for smartphones of certain sizes (very limited) as tablets hadn’t come out yet. Once tablets came out it changed everything. Instead of having to do 2 websites we now had to build the code to accommodate smartphones of varying sizes, tablets of varying sizes and computers. So responsive design came along and we now have the ability to create 1 site that works on all devices.
There’s even more good news with responsive design. That is as your site ages, if the responsive design was done correctly, it doesn’t matter much what comes out next in the smartphone or tablet arena (bigger/smaller) it will display properly. With rumors of bigger smartphones and tablets (12 inch tablets) coming out your site should still work. So in theory, depending on what else is programmed into your site, the longevity of your site should last a bit longer than the old standard HTML sites.
Why should you do responsive design? When you consider that over 50% of websites are now visited by mobile devices, you better make sure your site works on those devices. To ignore that fact would be the equivalent of ignoring the old standard telephone when it first came out. Users want what they want when they want it! So if your site is difficult to manage on their smartphone or tablet they’re going to your competition!
Are you ready to see some responsive design examples that we’ve done for our clients? We’ll list some examples of what we’ve done in a moment, but first we must share with you how to see it without pulling out your smartphone or tablet. So here it goes.
Regardless of browser (Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, FireFox or Safari), if you grab the lower right side or corner of your browser by holding down your left click button and then drag the browser towards the left you’ll see the site adjust to the size of the screen/browser.
Here are some examples of client’s sites that we’ve built using responsive design:
One more thing. Lets say your website has a bit of age on it, but you’re not ready to create a brand new site. We can, in most cases, retrofit a site so that it’s responsive. We’ve done that with several clients!