Unlocking Your Website’s Potential with Responsive Design

09/07 in Usability / iMap

(Part 1 of a 2 part series on Responsive Web Design)

Our Group Creative Director Todd Chambers spends his time discovering ways to boost user-experience and generate trust for brands, all while optimizing business objectives. Which is why he’s the guy you want to learn about Responsive Web Design (RWD) from. Don’t worry, if you’re still itching for more information about RWD by the time you finish this post, he’ll be back soon with part two of this series. 


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By now most of us have heard the buzz surrounding Responsive Web Design (RWD). The premise is simple: build one HTML page and leverage the power of CSS3 media queries to vary its presentation and content for multiple devices. No more building separate pages for tablets and smartphones. Cook up one batch of code, and rest assured that everyone visiting your site benefits from a custom experience. Talk about a game-changer.

The RWD approach, first put forward by Ethan Marcotte in his 2010 article in A List Apart, has taken the design world by storm.  So much so that his now famous manifesto is referred to as “the article that launched a thousand website redesigns.”  But unlike many design movements past, this one is no flash in the pan. It’s gotten some serious traction, and marketers as well as Internet luminaries are adopting the workflow at an ever-increasing rate. Well-known brands are certainly not shying away; both Sony and The Boston Globe embraced the paradigm and rebuilt their websites using RWD. The movement is gaining so much momentum that Google recently went on record in their Webmaster Central Blog recommending it as the standard for mobile design moving forward.  Wow!

Industry leaders have predicted that 2012 is the year that mobile website visits will finally out number those made by desktop users. Please, don’t miss this; it’s a huge deal. More users will access your content, browse your catalog and yes, purchase your goods and services via their smartphones and tablets than by using a conventional PC. Are you ready for that shift? If you’re preparing for a website redesign project or are in the process of building a new web property, you owe it to yourself and your users to seriously consider Responsive Web Design.

Join us next time and we’ll continue to explore the exciting opportunities RWD affords us as marketers, retailers and content providers. We will look a little deeper at what types of projects are best suited for this approach and how building sites this way affects budgets, timelines and workflows. We’ll also take a look at a few more inspiring examples of those who have led the way in this exciting progression.