I love my job and the many opportunities that come with it.  I love that I get excited about up-and-coming technology, new knowledge, and breakthroughs that make your online experience (and hopefully your lives) better.  I also love the direction our browsers are taking us.

If you haven’t heard of responsive Web design, don’t worry.  A lot of Web designers still haven’t heard of it, and even fewer are using it.  The idea has only been around for about two years, and it’s acceptance as a Web standard is even younger.  But in June of this year, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) officially released a recommendation that Web sites be created using responsive design.

But what is Responsive Web Design?
Responsive Web design is a practice of creating Web sites with fluid layouts which adapt to individual viewing screens.  So what does that mean for you and your Web site?  It means that we can create one site that looks good on any device, no matter the screen size.

The recent push for responsive Web design has come from the overwhelming influx of post-PC devices.  It’s predicted that, by 2014, mobile internet usage will exceed desktop computers.  This has created a need to adapt our online experiences from a desktop-only approach and cater to emerging devices.

Unfortunately, these devices not only have smaller screens with different aspect ratios, but the interface is completely different.  We use pokes instead of clicks.  Swipes instead of scrolls.  Pinches instead of zooms.  And we load pages on the fly, over wireless networks, from anywhere.

So the game is changing for Web developers around the world.  The challenge to deliver Web sites that look great and work well on a wide range of devices requires a shift in the very basic ways we create the sites.  Historically, Web pages started with fixed width layouts, meaning the designer created a page that was exactly so many pixels wide.  This worked well on most desktop computer screens, but the new arrival of smaller (and larger) screens means that a fixed-width page is going too be too big or too small.

In the past few years, the Web design community has risen to meet this challenge with the creation of stand-alone mobile sites.  If you have a smart phone, you’ve probably seen a mobile site.  While they have the ability to create a great experience for specific devices, there are still two major obstacles.  The first is that a new implementation of the site must be created to address each platform.  To minimally capitalize on the screen size of each device you’d have to create at least three versions of your site: for phones, tablets, and desktops.  But that means paying for at least three Web sites.  And there’s still the possibility that another platform will emerge that your Web site cannot cater to.  The second obstacle is the maintenance of each stand-alone site.  By creating multiple sites, the content on each instance must be kept up-to-date.  That means multiple amounts of work or increases in third-party update fees.

That’s why I’m so excited about the direction my field is going.  Responsive Web designing allows us to create one Web page that not only fills each screen, it adapts the content to suit each audience.  We have the power to make buttons bigger on touch screen devices or reveal extra content on extra large monitors.  It’s the ideal solution to the continuing emergence of Post-PC devices and will ensure that the sites we at Illuminate Design Studio create will look great to any viewer and work well.  That’s always been our goal and we’re glad to see that the future will continue to hold more opportunities for us to fulfill our vision.

We’d love to design a responsive site for you.  If you’d like to learn more, request a proposal and we’d love to tell you more about the solutions we can offer you.