Does Your WordPress Web Design Company Use Responsive Design?

Responsive design in webpages is described as a way to create websites so that viewers are able to fully appreciate what they see without having to navigate too much to read or look at things. This minimal-concept experience is meant for viewing websites over a multitude of different screens – this may be a desktop monitor or a laptop, tablet, mobile, e-reader or PDA screen.

Responsive web design ties in perfectly with the fluidity and open-code of WordPress websites and blogs. Since WordPress unveiled its Twenty Something theme for the current year – known as Twenty Twelve – it made the formal introduction into responsive design. Now, WordPress websites which use the default theme (which many of them do) will be perfect for viewing in a host of devices.

Why Responsive Design Is Useful For Your Clients

If you are designing WordPress websites that are only for local companies or pages, maybe responsive design is an unnecessary expense. What is more likely is that your WordPress website design company caters to clients who have many different kinds of services to offer users across the world. Web companies’ websites that are likely to be viewed on the go, like on phones and tablets are definitely in need of responsive design. Such services include those that allow photo sharing, location tracking, constant updates of news and information, and entertainment options.

The many benefits of switching a web design to responsive design are:

• Your websites will not only look streamlined on desktops, they will perfectly adapt to various device screen sizes so that they continue to look great and appear comprehensible to viewers.
• Creating a single website design that is workable across a number of viewing platforms is an achievement of web designing. Why would you not choose to adopt it? Web designing companies, as well as the clients whose websites are being designed, can save time, effort and money by making one site instead of a separate one for mobile viewing.
• A large concentration of WordPress websites are blogs, so it can be assumed that they use statistical tracking tools to figure out their traffic density and its composition. Many small businesses which ask you to create their websites also lean towards WordPress, because the ease of adding plugins to your website outweighs creating code for a site from scratch. The point is, responsive design WordPress websites will be better captured by analytics applications like Google Analytics as information from various media will be gathered as one and easier to analyze rather than keeping track of traffic from desktop and mobile viewers in a separate manner.
• Mobile versions of websites are now considered obsolete; social media has taken the internet world by storm and any website is incomplete without its options for sharing information on various social media sites with a single click, or links for the company handles on various social media websites. Responsive design means one website to rule them all, and so easier sharing and easier social media integration and statistical information collection.
• SEO is enhanced with a responsive design. Since your website has become one unit, every page linked to your main website will have the same URL, thus making it easier for Google crawlers. This can cause a boost in SEO credibility and push the site higher up the search engine rankings.
• Responsive design is wholly less of a hassle because it eliminates the need for webpage code that determined where the page loading request is coming from through agent strings. This is replaced by a more precise method that accounts for the huge number of mobile and desktop devices and browsers now in use.
• Web design coding is much easier to run and modify as needed. Simple changes can quickly shift the way your WordPress site looks on a particular medium.

Many big companies use responsive design now instead of static old style webpage designs. The quickest way to determine whether a website is built on responsive web design is by opening the site in a browser for the desktop and then resizing it. When you resize the page, the layout of the elements of the website may change, indicating responsive use.

Technically Defining Responsive Design

The paragraph above tells you how to see when a website has responsive design. But what exactly are the elements that make up this different kind of web designing?

1. Having a fluid grid – Responsive design has made PX or pixels outdated, and ushered in the use of percentages for describing the dimensions instead. Fluid grid talks about percentages in its CSS as opposed to the PX for a conventional fixed width description of page elements.
2. Images are responsive – Again with images, the fluid grid is observed. Instead of fixed width, image dimensions are taken up to a maximum width (which is what you would be seeing when viewing a web page on a desktop browser); this is the 100 percent value. This is how scaling of pictures occurs when the dimensions of the viewing screen are less than a desktop.
3. Media Queries – Custom CSS is enabled depending on the minimum and the maximum browser measurement.

When you are designing WordPress websites for companies, especially small businesses that could use a mobile presence but may find it difficult or costly to create a separate mobile app, it is probably best to create their pages using responsive web design. Media moguls believe that by 2014, mobile browser viewing will have stepped ahead of desktop browser viewing, which says a lot about the importance of having a mobile-friendly page.

A few WordPress themes that are available for free are useful for starting responsive designing. They are easy to adapt as needed:

1. Responsive Twenty Ten;
2. WordPress Theme with Responsive Layout: Yoko (by Smashing Magazine);
3. Origin Responsive WordPress Theme.

If your company does not use responsive design, maybe now you are convinced that you need to start adopting it. However, this is not a complete blanket rule; a few clients’ sites may be better without the cost of responsive designing.

Author Bio

Scott Heron is a freelance web designer & SEO with many years experience.  For more info, you can follow him on Google+