Responsive Website Design

Mobile devices have become a fact of everyday live. Since the launch of the original iPhone in 2007, the use of mobile devices has exploded and for many people today, a mobile device is their only connection to the Internet and the World Wide Web.

However, even today, there are still a lot of websites created are still purely designed for a desktop environment. People sitting behind desks working on large screens and who are able to view a large amount of information at the same time. Mobile devices with their small screens are often still neglected and ignored and browsing these big screen websites on these small screen devices can often be a cumbersome and frustrating experience.

For a few years it was popular for many websites to create a so-called Mobile Version. A mobile version of a website would often live on a m. sub-domain and if a mobile device was detected a redirect would be initiated to bring the visitor to the website’s mobile version. Often the mobile version of a website was only a limited functional version of the major website. A good example of a popular website with such a mobile version is m.facebook.com, which is the mobile version of the familiar Facebook website.

Responsive Design

With a responsive design, there is no longer a dedicated mobile version of a website. In essence, responsive means that the design of a website will adjust itself to a wide range of different screen sizes. This means that a single page is presented to the browser and that this one page has the intelligence built in to understand the viewing limitations and to adjust it’s visualisation of information to these limitations.

In laymen terms, a responsive website adapts to its physical environment. This website, which you’re currently reading this text on, is in fact such a responsive website. If you’re on a desktop browser, simply resize the browser window by dragging the bottom-right corner. When the window window gets smaller, the information will adjusts itself to fit the new browser size. When mobile phone screen size is reached, the layout of the information on the page will be rearranged to make the content fit better in the screen size of a typical mobile phone.

Responsive design is a great feature to have implemented on your website. It increases viewing pleasure for many of our clients websites.