Do Not Simply React, Respond

If you just react to each new online development, you’ll be working night and day to keep up. On the other hand, with the help of a forward-thinking web development team, you can establish the groundwork to have a site that responds to the rich ecosystem of technologies that exist.

We’re proud to announce the launch of our Responsive Design Checker! Now, you can see how your site’s visual elements (but not its functional elements) will respond to different screen sizes, which is becoming more and more important in online strategy.

So why is responsive design important? You might not have noticed, but an obscure little company out of California released a new product last week, the iPad mini. With the iPad mini, the market is reaffirming its love of device diversity. Apple alone has at least nine different screen sizes for its web-enabled devices, and then you need to consider Android, Windows, and even BlackBerry devices.

Every screen will show your website or web service differently, but different doesn’t need to be scary—different can be beautiful. You can take steps to ensure that, no matter which device your users have, you’re offering them a great experience without having to develop separate websites. You can develop one site that includes code that will tell different devices/browsers to bring up different site layouts. Your Android tablet customers will see a design optimized for their screen size, and your iPhone users will see a different layout that works better for their devices.

I know we’ve been talking about responsive design a lot lately, but it’s the biggest thing to hit the internet since kittens. In fact, some of the newest development technologies, including HTML5 and CSS3, are garnering some attention specifically because of how well they play with different devices and permit responsive design.

Yes, we design and develop websites for others, but we also have our own site to think about. We need to consider how it will be accessed by the numerous current devices and innumerable new products that we cannot predict. That’s why our site is responsive. Is your site responsive?