Responsive Design for Mobile Websites

Mobile web usage is experiencing great growth. It's reality that people are spending more and more time browsing and buying while they are on the go. Smart companies recognize this trend and capitalizes on it. That's why, over the past year, responsive design has become quite interesting topic. In the next four to five years, most probably we’ll  need to design for a number of additional inventions. It's clear that smartphones are no longer just for geeks and tech-oriented people.

As of February 2011 worldwide sales of smartphones surpassed those of desktop and laptop computers together. (Smartonline,  Feb 2012).
In the U.S. there are 84 milion smartphone users (35% of all adults) (Pew Research, Jul 2011). 
In Canada, 40% of the 20 milion people who own a mobile phone say that theirs mobile is a smartphone. (comScore, Nov 2011).

With desktop use slowing, it’s obvious that people are using smartphones more and more for some kind of work. Smartphones are slowly becoming some kind of business tools, and not anymore just a tool to check email or calendar entry.

 
That's why, forward-thinking companies are putting into place now unique web strategies and platforms to enable the mobile market to both work and play.   

The way of how people use the web is changing really fast, but most companies have failed to take some bigger advantage. There's a really great opportunity for the companies which will create some mobile experience before their competitors can.
Responsive Web design is the approach that suggests that design and development should respond to the user’s behavior and environment based on screen size, platform and orientation. 

As the user switches from their laptop to iPad, the website should automatically switch to best resolution, image size and scripting abilities. In other words, the website should have the technology to automatically respond to the user’s preferences.

How it looks like live, you can see here.

If you would like to test your website and see how it looks like in different resolutions, go to Responsive design testing tool    

You should be aware that beside mobile phones and personal computers, devices like tablets and netbooks started to be more and more popular.

Of course, as screen sizes and display resolutions are widening every day, creating a different versions of website that targets each device is not a practical way. This is the problem that responsive web design can solve.  

Besides saving you from frustration, responsive Web design is also best for the user. Every custom solution makes for a better user experience. With responsive Web design, we can create custom solutions for a wider range of users, on a wider range of devices. Responsive Web design creates a great custom experience for everyone.