Came across this article and am wondering if it's actually worth doing: https://managewp.com/5-reasons-why-responsive-design-is-not-worth-it Recently one site that I used to frequent switched to a responsive design and, honestly, I think their new design is driving people away. Can't prove it, but it's driven me away (kinda). My question is do you personally find it worthwhile making your site responsive? And most importantly can it hurt a site / online business instead of helping it?
Wow. Rare to see an article opposing responsive-design. I have used responsive-approach in almost all of my projects now. All with a thought to keep a page be "viewable" in any screen sizes, either on landscape or portrait modes. Sometimes, I have to go down and create the difficult-to-manage CSS.3's media-queries; but most of the time, just using em and percentage (instead of pixel) is sufficient. I don't know about responsive WP themes, since I don't do WP. RWD is difficult? Yes I can't agree more But personally, I don't find any disadvantages in responsive-design. Roughly, it's just an approach to make a page more compatible with various devices. Hendra
We have switched some old website to responsive design and it has been beneficial for us. I don's agree with you that it hurt a site / online business instead of helping it. Recently, there has been a huge surge in the number of mobile users accessing the internet. mobile optimization of websites opens them to this huge reservoir of potential customers. So, we can't say that responsive design hurt the website and business instead of helping it. we have a number of responsive design and found that huge reservoir of potential customers.
It was asked as a question. I am not stating this as a fact. My thing is I don't want to lose visitors, but most importantly conversions for the sake of some cool trend (site responsiveness). Some big e-commerce players are not anxious to catch and please every mobile user and mostly stick to their regular design, it seems like. There's another article I came across this morning as I was pondering this whole topic. Very educational: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/201...sign-should-not-be-your-only-mobile-strategy/
Responsive design is made in order to make things easier for mobile users. It should not drive users away. It would also depend on the look of the site. A lot of websites are now taking advantage of responsive themes in order to improve website performance. But in the end, no one will dictate you what you want to do with your site. If you dont feel comfortable with it, then you dont have to do it. You just have to note that Google also recognizes websites that are up to date - we are not only talking about responsive websites but also those with UI/UX design.
That article's dumb, of coarse its worth it. Maybe because its from 2012, but my expectation is for a site to be responsive and fit on whatever resolution now. Unless you're sites super complex it really shouldn't take too much longer to responsivify it. Even the website that published that article is responsive.
The site that write that article is responsive. Shrink your browser to any size and you will see. Come on, It's not that so hard to change a site from static to responsive.
hi, just read the article. I also asked myself this question, why responsive and not classic design. A huge amount of today pc's use more than 1024x768, maybe more than 80%. The idea of responsive design is to show your content more or less on multiple devices, for instance on a 1600x1200 resolution, the classic look and feel, and im thinking of 960px wide, will look like a tiny page on huge display, not an ugly look, but why not show more, maybe an aditional sidebar, more info etc. The same applies for smaller resolutions, tablets, phones...the examples from that article are not the best ones, you don't need to drop the sidebar or any other info, just find a smarter way to insert them...too bad i can't think of an example right now, and you can always go for an app for mobile devices (not a really cheap solution).
You better get with RWD, most people view sites on smartphones and tablets, who wants to pinch and zoom just to be able to click a button?
That article would be ignorant halfwit mouth-breathing bullshit, if not for one thing; the sites he was looking at all had GARBAGE responsiveness; it's like they cherry-picked some of the worst sites out there... Like that "cats who code" mess which doesn't change the heading sizes and is a useless wreck on desktop much less mobile... but that's not responsive layouts fault, that's developer ineptitude in action; Hardly a shock that site being rubbish since it's the typical train wreck of "I can haz intarnets" turdpress code mated to idiotic mouth-breathing "caching, what's that?" bull like encoding static images into the markup. 90k of markup for 3.3k of plaintext and not even a half dozen content media items is nothing more than "You thought you were qualified to build a website WHY exactly?" in action. There is a LOT of bull in that article though, like the whole "takes longer and costs more" idiocy; 100% grade A farm fresh manure since if you started out building the website PROPERLY in the first blasted place (aka semantic markup with semi-fluid elastic layout) making it responsive down to mobile shouldn't take more than 10 minutes and 100 lines / 2k of code! Though again that's only true if you started out building the website properly -- without gooftard framework bull, without asshat fixed design, and without a whole slew of other mount-breaking dumbass bull that most people sleaze out websites with. For those of us who embraced semantic markup, progressive enhancement and accessible design before CSS3 was a twinkle in the W3C's eye responsive layout is simply the next logical step! For those who never pulled their heads out of 1997's ass -- you know, the dipshit fools who praise HTML 5 since three years ago they were still sleazing out presentational 4 tranny and STILL insist on using the STYLE tag and STYLE attribute without media targets -- All of the stepping stones that make sites more useful to users leading you to responsive layout may as well be an alien language... (Sontaran? Klingon? Minbari?) Naturally that ignorance of accessible practices, mated to idiocies like dicking around in Photoshop before you even have a working coded layout, bloated framework manure like blueprint or bootcrap, endless pointless "gee ain't it neat" scripttardery for NOTHING like the dumbasses who think jQuery serves a legitimate purpose, pre-processing bull that just makes the entire process more complex for NOTHING (other than aiding those afraid to hit ^C^V and type "-moz" and "-webkit" maybe eight times for an ENTIRE website) -- it's not exactly a shock that many "responsive" sites are just as inaccessible a wreck of ineptitude as the fixed width fixed font "accessibility, what's that?!?" garbage that preceded them. As before there was even such a thing with responsive layout, the problem lies not with the accessibility concepts, so much as it lies with the people who don't know enough about HTML, CSS, JavaScript or accessibility to be building websites in the first blasted place! Though the real manure is the "non-responsive designs usually work" nonsense, since even their own examples are a usability nightmare I sure as shine-ola wouldn't want to use on my phone or tablet. It's not rocket science, it's NOT hard to do... PEOPLE!!! STOP MAKING IT HARD BY PISSING ALL OVER ACCESSIBILITY AND THE ENTIRE REASON HTML EVEN EXISTS before you even get to the point of making it responsive! But there's a reason my disgust to the point of nausea with the current state of web development has been uprated to outright projectile vomiting.
You want statistics. Here's news just out today: I say I would trade any computer users for mobile users. Singles' Day sales boom breaks records HANGZHOU, Nov. 11 -- The online buying fiesta that is China's Singles' Day hit new records, with e-commerce giant Alibaba selling over 36 billion yuan (5.9 billion U.S. dollars) of goods by 1:31 p.m. on Tuesday. Online sales -- on Alibaba's Tmall.com, Taobao.com and overseas outlets, such as AliExpress -- surpassed 36.2 billion yuan by 1:31 p.m., beating Tmall.com and Taobao.com's combined 2013 Singles's Day sales, according to the company. This marks the first time Alibaba has chosen to launch its Singles' Day campaign on both its domestic and overseas outlets. In the first hour of Tuesday's sale alone, customers from 175 countries and regions outside the Chinese mainland joined the shopping spree, with Hong Kong, the United States and Taiwan claiming the top-buyer spots. The company said about 70 percent of shoppers used mobile devices to clinch deals at the start of the day, marking a major shift from computers to mobile devices as the favored tools for online purchases.
You have to remember that while creating mobile website, we can concentrate solely on mobile users and the funcionalities they need, whereas RWD includes all funcionalities, even those from desktop version, but adjusted to smaller devices or invisible. It can have a negative impact on web loading time and server overload. Nevertheless, a website in RWD is at the same time independent from a mobile device which it is displayed on – thus the website is prepared for new solutions which may appear in the future.
Properly designed, there is NO overhead with RWD, nor would it affect loading time (again, if properly managed). While a separate mobile website is purely annoying, as it is usually actually lacking in content (severly restricted menu-functions et al), and way too many who implement it forgets that sharing links, for instance, should NEVER EVER be done using the link for the mobile website - it completely breaks the page when viewed on a computer - instead it should share the regular link, and if the user comes from a mobile device, redirect to the mobile version, which it does already. Why people get this wrong is beyond my comprehension. Granted, these pitfalls can also be overcome by properly coding the site, of course, but then you'll have to maintain two codebases instead of one - which creates more overhead, more bugs, and demands more money to keep up to date.