What is Responsive Web Design

One of the latest trends on the internet is responsive web design. Mashable called 2013, “The Year of Responsive Web Design” This technique is all about making your website look its best on different mobile devices. We are currently offering this add on to all of our new site packages – so be sure to ask us about this if you are interested in seeing your new site work this way. Here’s a look at a website that we created with this technology: If you’ve ever opened a website on an iPhone, you know that most websites scale the page down to an unreadable size. Then you have to pinch to zoom in to find the content you want. Otherwise the website redirects you to a mobile specific version of their site at a different URL. Responsive sites manipulate the content of the main website to fit the size of screen on your device. It allows the most important information to be reordered specific to the user/device that is being used. Here are a few reasons you might consider mobile-ready websites important:

• 28% of Internet usage comes from a mobile phone.
• Tablet sales are expected to be over 100 million this year
• Mobile and tablet usage is expected to takeover desktop usage in 2013
• 67% of users claim that they are more likely to make a purchase on a mobile-friendly website
• Google recommends using responsive website design

Although this practice is best-suited for development of a new site, existing sites can also be retrofitted with responsive design. Here is a site that we created for a client over a year ago, who decided that it was time to focus on making their website mobile or responsive specific. As you can see – nothing has changed with the site itself on the computer browser – but we have essentially added new layouts that pull into the ipad and iphone devices to have  a better response from people using those devices specifically. The best part of this is that the client still only has to update and maintain one website (as opposed to updating a standard and mobile version of a site- it’s all working from the same back-end “dashboard”). Of course all websites that we build do work and function properly on mobile and iPad devices, responsive technology is simply taking that to the next level. Not only will your site function for these devices, but it will create a better user experience that is specific to that device. If you are interested in adding this technology to an existing site that we created for you in the past, please email nikki@doodledogadvertising.com and we’d be happy to provide you with a quote to do so. Visit these repsponsive website designs at www.heatherlily.com or www.folklorecinema.com If you’d like to see how your site looks on different devices, visit http://responsive.is/ and enter your URL on the top of the page. You can also view your website on different mobile devices here.