17 July 2013
The stats don't lie. We are living in a world where browsing the web from mobile devices (smartphones and tablet) has become prevalent.
Depending on which report you read, and which country you live in, between 10-25% of all unique website visits are happening via mobile devices. That is unique visits (different IP addresses), which means when this percentage is applied to total web page views, mobile device browsers will soon account for 40-50% of visits.
The problem is that many businesses do not have mobile optimized websites.
When the iPhone first revolutionized the smartphone industry, web experts realized that at the very least, we shouldn't have dense websites filled with flash (flv) if we wanted to be seen at all on mobile web browsers.
It seems this message has made its way to a large number of businesses. However, most business websites still require the mobile visitor to pinch their screens and move their fingers in many curious directions to get to a good view of their desired section of a page.
Enter Responsive Web Design. KAYWEB (my web design company with offices in Sydney, Melbourne, New York and Manila) defines Responsive Web Design (RWD) as:
"...a technique used to attain and provide clients with an easy to use and well designed website across different computer platforms (i.e. viewing the website from a desktop, phone or tablet).
Responsive Web Design aims to reduce scrolling, panning and resizing, by utilizing the new CSS3 (Cascading Style Sheets ver.3) standard, which allows querying a device for its characteristics to determine how the website should be presented, this provides a more intuitive and easy to use website.
Responsive Web Design caters for visitors using any browser, including mobile phone browsers like the iPhone, tablet browser like the iPad and desktop browsers. Responsive Web Design uses an approach whereby it responds to the characteristic of the browser, which allows cross platform compatibility of the site.
As regular websites are developed for large monitors, they are not friendly when trying to be viewed on mobile devices which have considerably smaller screens, however Responsive Web Design rectifies this issue by being able to respond to the characteristics of the browser and delivering an effective and user-friendly website."