What Does a Responsive Website Mean?

1. What is responsive web design?

Responsive web design is a technique that allows a website to alter its layout according to the device that it is being viewed on. For example, if a website is being viewed on a mobile device, the layout of the website will be altered in such a way that all of the text on the website is easier to read and navigate on a smaller screen. If the website is being viewed on a desktop computer, the layout of the website will be altered in a way to accommodate the large screen of a desktop computer.

A small, yet very important, difference in some websites is the inclusion of a drop-down carousel at the top of the webpage. For instance, at the top of many web pages are some form of a search bar, icons for social media sharing or email sharing, and possibly some other navigation items such as a short blog post, contact us form, and a subscribe to the mailing list. Drop-down carousels in the form of search icons and social sharing icons make it easier for the user to locate information on the website without having to scroll as far down the webpage.

Responsive web design allowed these carousels to grow while maintaining a visual that was distinct and distinguishable from the rest of the webpage. If the website was designed to be used in a desktop environment, a drop-down carousel located at the top of the webpage would need to be deleted. If this was the case, the smooth scrolling experience would be compromised.

Back in 2011, Google Google noticed something strange with their search results page. If a user typed in the words "an apple," they would not only be able to see the search results page but also receive a pop-up asking if they wanted to buy Apple's new phone. From what was proven, Google was altering their results to highlight the phone instead of the search box.

Needless to say, the world of SEO was left wondering what on earth this meant, so many speculating that perhaps Google was testing out some new form of ranking influence.

2. Why should I use a responsive website?

A responsive website is a website that responds to the device it’s being viewed on, so it will look and function differently depending on the device it’s being viewed on. For example, a responsive website will look different on a mobile phone than it does on a computer. Another example of a responsive website would be that on television, the website would look different in landscape mode compared to portrait mode.

2. What are the advantages of using responsive web design?

Improved site speed, the ability to cater for a variety of screen sizes, and the ability to re-sell “orphaned” product pages.

If you have a site that is set up for a desktop computer and you want to start showing the site on a mobile phone, the site will be smaller because the width and height of the counting area is smaller.

Plus you now don’t have to get technical with your site. For our purposes here, let’s suppose you’ve got a site with 20 different products. However, you typically see traffic coming to the site from 20 different phone numbers. Because of responsive web design, you can remove the product listings and stick the traffic to the home page, removing distractions that would prevent the visitor from purchasing. We can also point the phone numbers at the most important page on the site and redirect there, keeping the visitor focused on your main call to action and buying intent.

3. What are some examples of a responsive web design that can be utilized?

An example would be if you don’t have a responsive web design setup, you can utilize “drop-down” radio buttons below each product listing. Because you don’t have a responsive web design, there is no need to go into extreme detail with how most SEO companies should be doing Organic SEO for your site, using keywords instead of lengthy anchor text links, no NOW 404 server errors, all free of charge, with a variety of offsite SEO channels.

3. How do I make my existing site responsive?

Making a site responsive is fairly simple. There are a few ways of doing this. The first way is to use a pre-existing template or framework like Bootstrap. Bootstrap is a great way to get started quickly with a responsive site. Next to that, there’s also responsive photography, where media queries are used to change the visual style as the device or device screen grows.

2. When should I consider starting my responsive site? It’s difficult to say, however starting a responsive site should be the first step for any new online business. The reason for this is that there are some elements with a higher degree of “responsibility”, that can lead to the significant financial downside by not being responsive, such as pricing or shipping information for the product.

However, there are several benefits from starting a responsive site, such as:

I am not going to go into great detail here, as that can be found in the official W3Schools primer on responsive web design. What I will say is that a good responsive site is easy for a newbie to set up and maintain. The cost of developing it, however, is high.

3. How do I know if my site is responsive? It depends. There are a few ways to check. One is by using tools such as Google’s responsive images test or DHTML, a compatibility testing framework used by Google Chrome for rapid website testing. If you are connecting a device that does not support media queries to your server, it may fail the image test. Two, you can try the tools commonly used by web developers, such as JSDT, Google’s Mobile-Friendly Testing Kit. If it passes the test, it’s likely responsive. These are the best ways to see immediately if your site is responsive. That said, some sites do not pass these tests, and that can still be a good place to begin building if you’re brand new.

A good, free tool to check if your site is responsive is Yoast.

4. How can I test how my site looks on a mobile device?

There are a lot of different ways to test how your site looks on a mobile device. You can use Chrome’s device mode, which allows you to test how your site looks on different devices. You can also test your site using a service like BrowserStack that allows you to simulate how your site looks on different devices. But as I mentioned before, these other methods won’t always give you the best results. Responsive web design allows them to resize your web page to a mobile device’s screen size, providing you the best possible results. Ideally, when you work on your website, you should design your website to look nice on different devices. It’s critical for us to choose the device that will look the best on our website. But responsive web design dramatically changes the way we design responsive websites. It means whenever we type what on our mobile device (including keyboards), it will automatically adapt itself to the size of the screen. Hence, whenever we make a change to our website’s look and feel, it immediately adapts in the same way on all of our devices. How cool is that?

2. How is responsive web design different from other mobile-first techniques? Responsive web design uses the same markup and CSS rules for web pages, and the same website page will look great on all of your devices (iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac). So every page on your site will look good on a desktop and on a phone, without needing the vendor prefixes like ‘website, etc. This is a huge benefit since all devices will use the same version of the same code. By doing this, we're forcing our site to adapt to the device that users are using. For example, when you drag your finger from one screen of your phone to a different screen of your laptop, all of the code will change automatically to adapt to that. Try this: open any of your favorite websites and start dragging your finger from one screen of your phone to another.

Conclusion: Your customers will continue to access your site from more and more devices, so make sure your website is ready for the future by using a responsive design.

There are over 6 billion mobile phone users in the world, and in the next few years, the number of mobile phone users is expected to grow to 7.6 billion. With this large number of new mobile users comes an increased need to provide them with an enjoyable online experience. There’s a saying:

‘If you build it, they will come (or so they say).’

Responsive web design is creating artwork that works a little better on all types of screens.

When a user first visits your website, there is a small fraction of screen real estate that is dedicated to the website. If your website design is not responsive, you will not be able to respond to the layout changes that a user has made on their device, and your website will look terrible on all types of mobile devices.

Think of your website as a piece of art. The artwork will look the best on a high-definition TV, and on a desktop computer — because they are the only devices that have been designed to accommodate high-definition content. As designers, we must ensure that our websites display the best artwork on all types of screens.

But, designing for multiple screen sizes isn’t easy. It is very common for the average website designer to make some tweaks on the website template and wait 1–3 weeks for the website to update.

Well, this is unacceptable.

Those lead to errors and lost sales from consumers.

Our clients need websites that they can enjoy on any type of screen. But if your website updates itself several times a day, how will the website feel comfortable for a user on a different operating system, or a different device size?

This is where responsive web design comes in.

A responsive website is a website that works better on different devices — just not in every screen size.