Responsive web design, fluid designs and other buzz phrases have been thrown around lately. Some may wonder what they mean or what is the reasoning behind it all. Years ago, before tablets and smart phones became super popular, most web sites were designed for full size desktop screens.
These older sites ranged in pixel width, usually 1024 pixels wide or less. So most of the sites did not adjust to the screen size because there was no need to. With the boom of smart phones, the screen sizes that people viewed web sites changed dramatically.
The first solution and some sites do still do this, is to make a separate site that appears on smaller screens. The main site would have a code in it to detect the size of screen that is viewing it, then forward to the mobile site if the viewer was on phone or tablet with a smaller screen. Usually the mobile sites stripped out most coding and larger images to make the site load faster, of course for developers this made additional work and essentially means you had to maintain two sites, instead of one.
The next step was to create a responsive web site.
What responsive means is to create a site that automatically re-sizes the current content according to the screen size that is viewing it. By doing this you will improve your loading times and Google will favor a site that is responsive more than one that is not.
Usually a responsive site will use CSS and Javascript to swap out the menu with a more mobile friendly menu. Using a framework such as Foundation 5, Bootstrap or Skeleton helps make your design responsive by setting up the classes you need and usually uses a grid layout that is adaptable to any screen.
By making your site responsive your web site will benefit in many ways such as:
- Your site will have only one url, where a mobile plugin version of a website might have a different URL such as mobile.mysite.com.
- No redirects so loading times are faster.
- Less time to maintain your website.
- Helps search engines index your site properly.
If your web site needs a responsive layout or just need some updating, contact us at 734-729-7082, VR Metro can improve your web presence substantially and can offer great Search Engine Optimization for your new or current web site!
Comments are closed.