Responsive Design Myth

One common myths that you’d hear, when it comes to responsiveness, is how easy it is to create and maintain a responsive website. Although in theory that might be the case, in practice maintaining a responsive site is almost like maintaining multiple versions of your original site.

The clients might say that each separate design and redesign, for future devices as well as new branding, requires large amounts of capital and therefore they should just invest in responsive now and never have to worry about redesign in the future. After all, the responsive design is a single site that considers the users’ preferences and adapts to their screen size, platform and orientation.

That is true, but in order to create CSS that nicely responds to Android, iPhone, iPad, large screen resolution and your old-school phones, it isn’t enough to just create one website. What you will end up doing is adjusting your website for every one of these use cases. More so, in order to provide a great customer experience, it won’t be enough to have elements “shift” around the page, in order to fit inside the tiny mobile display or to stretch around the large screens. You will need to carefully plan each layout, thinking of the content that’s most important for each devices. Is it worth it?

Yes, of course, it’s certainly worth it to create a responsive layout in order to give users across all devices a common experience, if it is appropriate for your business. Take a look at your Google Analytics first, see how many visitors are coming to your site from different devices, look at their screen resolutions and operating system and then decide who you want to please first. That’s right, you can’t please everyone all the time, and given that developing a responsive layout is a lot of work, start by understanding how many users will be affected if you do not implement the new layout. If the business sense tells you that responsive is not in demand yet, you may still choose to go ahead with the implementation, but it may no longer be a priority, in contrast with other much needed features.

All-in-all, whether to go the responsive route or not is up to you. There will be a lot of work and a lot of design decisions to make. If you do it, users are going to love you for it, and if you don’t do, they may not hate you.

Look at analytics, see if it’s worth it, make a decision, go!

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