The internet as we know it is constantly evolving; as digital experts it is our duty to position ourselves on the cutting edge. We want to steer our clients away from fad-ware and push them to engage into quality platforms and applications. Responsive web design (RWD) is a well tested, highly effective design paradigm that enables us to optimized websites across all devices.
Device Agnostic
Being device agnostic literally means the website doesn’t believe in one device over the other. The pages are designed according to predetermined breakpoints in the CSS which focus on the screen sizes instead of individual brands, devices, and operating systems. Did we mention that responsive design is Google’s recommended configuration.
A truly responsive design will accomodate any screen size by utilizing media queries and fluid grids to adjust the content. Responsive design forces the designers and developers to create consistent experiences across platforms because unlike the traditional mobile redirects of yesteryear the experience uses many of the same assets as the desktop would albeit they may have been adapted to smaller file sizes.
Ancillary Benefits
Some of the benefits of responsive design outside of the obvious is that responsive websites consolidate all of their traffic to one set of pages. This makes tracking traffic behavior as an aggregate easier and gives you the biggest picture available of your digital property. The other advantage of having one set of responsive web pages means that all of the authoritative links and “link juice” is being concentrated in one place, which means a higher quality score and better adwords placement. If anyone remembers the Google Panda update that penalized websites for having duplicate content, they will notice that responsive web pages had less issues because they did not have to reuse any copy.
Strategy
When implementing a responsive design it is important to focus on the user experience and plan out what modules are going to stack or disappear at certain breakpoints. In a nutshell you can estimate that a responsive website is going to double or triple the amount of effort required to develop a site. There are some site where that are exceptions to the rule of “responsive is better” and they have very good reasons why they do not translate to responsive well. If a website capitalizes of of a technology that is perfected for desktop computers (like flash) then responsive design will not work well for the mobile users. It is also worth mentioning that M-commerce has not yet matured into an equal of E-commerce and many E-commerce websites are yet to jump on the mobile bandwagon.
It is critical that brands that are entertaining the idea of going responsive think about how they are going to make a great experience inside of a responsive layout, because it is not enough that the user can access the same page from their laptop and their phone, they have to enjoy the experience when they are there. An example of this is convertibles, basically two types of car in one; however everyone can see that not all convertibles are equal, especially when one compares a Nissan 370z to a PT Cruiser.
Create an Experience
When building a responsive experience requires planning and creativity more so than older static designs. Evolving to meet the expectations of the user in a RWD framework can be difficult at first, but with determination and out-of-the-box creative thinking it is possible to leave lasting impressions and activate users in new and exciting ways. The below is a list of some of my favorite RWD sites.
Some inspired responsive websites are
- A good example of a standard responsive site
- A great example of consistently good experience for all screens
- The best example of a client side responsive ecommerce site
- An example of mixing responsive web design with parallax scrollling also you can make a lumberjack and a bear tousle!
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