What is a ‘Responsive’ Website?

You may have heard the term ‘Responsive Websites’.

Everyone wants their website to be mobile – and why not, it’s smart!

You should assume that a large majority of your audience could be researching businesses like yours while they are ‘on the go’ and if your website is not readable on smaller screens chances are they will go elsewhere just out of frustration.

Unfortunately, mobile sites can be expensive for the average business owner, not just to build, but also to maintain multiple versions of a site. This can be a big investment that you may not be ready for. A true mobile site may actually be more than one additional site – one for the iphone one for a blackberry, one for an ipad… and when those devices change in format, you’ll need updates as well. But there is another option, one that is an affordable and much more practical method, and it’s called Responsive Web Design.

The Intelligent Website

Wikipedia defines Responsive websites like this:

Responsive Web design (RWD) is a Web design approach aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices (from mobile phones to desktop computer monitors).

What that means is – your site will have just one version that sizes itself appropriately across all devices. Through intelligent use of CSS and HTML page layouts designers and web developers can now build sites that are flexible and ‘intelligent’.

Now when a user switches from a desktop to an iPad or to an iPhone the website responds by changing widths of images, text columns, the position of items and even resolutions, to accommodate images being displayed on Retina displays.

Brolly Media now builds all sites to be responsive – this can be done on simple HTML sites, as well as more complex CMS sites built in wordpress or Joomla. Even if you have an older site it can be rebuilt to accomodate a responsive layout.