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Welcome to the Rediscover Your Brand™ podcast. I’m your host Mike McCormick and today we are going to discuss responsive web design. We will cover what responsive web design is, how it works, how we can benefit from it, as well as compare responsive web design to other mobile design platforms.
To start we all want to know what responsive web design is. The actions are in the title, responsive web design is a process of designing one website that adjusts to the screen size it is being displayed on.
We all wonder how new technologies work and I am here today to tell you how responsive web design works. Responsive web design is based on a flexible grid pattern and with the use of HTML5, CSS and media queries, it creates an easy, friendly way for websites to have viewable content across all different platforms without the hassle. Responsive web design is making your website more comfortable for the end-user without making them do any work.
When working with new technologies we always want to know how this will benefit us in the long run as well as what are the short term benefits. Responsive web design has many benefits for both short term and long term processes. The first benefit is that responsive web design will eliminate the time and costs of building a separate mobile website. With responsive web design, you will only build on website and it will adjust to any screen size your site is being displayed on. The second benefit of responsive web design is that your site will not lose any content, unlike other mobile websites designs that make you pick and choose what you want your mobile users to view, responsive web design allows you to keep all of your content, let it be copy text or media images, and will also adjust the size of them to the screen they are being displayed on. Now there are plenty more benefits of responsive web design, you just need to go out and explore them.
In the United States, 28% of the population use their mobile devices as their primary way of accessing the web and that number is growing each and every day. With a large number of people using web-capable devices comes an array of new web-capable devices. Along with smartphones and tablets, individuals now can access the web through e-book readers, smart TVs, smart refrigerators, and even your car’s dashboard while you are driving down the road. With all these web-capable devices in mind, this has opened the door to multiple different web designs. It has become a common misconception that those utilizing mobile websites are creating and using them as applications, which is not always true. Sites can be created on dedicated mobile platforms strictly used for mobile web browsing access. Dedicated mobile websites and applications may be an exceptional way to go but they also limit the content you may provide on it which is not always the best for the end-user who is looking for a specific page or time that did not make the cut. Many others do not even have a mobile website and just stick with the same site they have now. This actually becomes very frustrating for the user because they will have to do extensive pinching, zooming, and scrolling to view content. Responsive web design gives you the best of both worlds; a site that contains all your content and is displayed accordingly on all different screen sizes.
Responsive web design is taking off fairly quickly and is being used by companies like Sony, The Boston Globe, ArtVersion Interactive Agency, and even President Obama’s campaign site.
That’s it for episode 32 of Rediscover Your Brand™. I’m your host Mike McCormick and this had been brought to you by ArtVersion Interactive Agency, you may contact us on Facebook at facebook.com/artversion and on Twitter at twitter.com/artversion or at Artversion.com. Thanks again for listening.