Responsive Web Design

Lately I have been looking more into responsive web design as opposed to device-specific websites. Responsive web design refers to a website that is developed and designed to adapt to the screen resolution of the device the website is being viewed on. Instead of designing different versions of websites for different devices (computers, mobile phones, tablets, etc.) you create one site that adapts to all.

A Senior Developer here at Sundog, Darin Livdahl, was willing to talk to me a little about responsive web design. He attended a conference last August called An Event Apart. He came back sharing a lot of interesting information and introduced me to responsive web design. Ethan Marcotte was one of the speakers at the conference and he talked about responsive web design. He gave a great example of responsive web design using a website he created called Robot… or Not. Check this website out and re-size your browser to see how the website changes at different resolutions. Ethan also wrote a great article about responsive web design that covers a lot of what he talked about at the conference. I asked Darin his opinion on responsive web design as opposed to mobile specific websites and he said that “instead of using our time focusing on one device, we can design one site that will be developed once that will work on all devices, not just one device really well.” Darin thinks that responsive web design will “become a standard web development practice” in the future.

When I start talking about responsive web design, I really start to get excited about where the future of the web is heading. I think there will still be some need for some mobile specific websites when there is only specific information that is needed at a mobile phone level. But even in that case we still have some control with responsive web design to pick and choose what appears first at a small screen resolution. Overall, I think responsive web design will save clients money in the long run because once we develop one responsive website, they will already have a website that will create a great user experience on all devices and they won’t have to create device specific websites in the future.