Responsive Website Development

Be prepared for every visitor to your site, whether from a phone, tablet or traditional web browser.

Get a Responsive Website Development Quote

You have a website. It is well designed and meets your needs and the needs of your customer. However, does it work well when viewed on an iPhone? A significant portion of web traffic originates from smart phones and tablets and this share is growing.

Chances are excellent that your best customers will access your website from a mobile device. Their experience is crucial to your company's success in the marketplace.

Increasingly, it is important to deliver an excellent experience, no matter what device is used. Some sites have a mobile version that relies on device detection and attempts to deliver a scaled down experience tailored to that device. But it would be extremely difficult to program for every type of device, and there are new phones and tablets coming to market every day.

Responsive websites work equally well in all common device types. From an iPhone to a web browser, your site looks great and is effective.

Challenges

No longer are successful web designs merely targeting a couple of versions of Internet Explorer and a few other web browsers on the desktop. Today the trend is to more capable browsers that get updated constantly and, importantly, mobile web browsers, particularly the iPhone and iPad. The rate of growth is such that these devices may be the most common in the near future. But, building an iPhone website would be a mistake. The market is diversifying and includes television devices and soon even car web browsers.

Rise and Relevancy of Responsive Web Design

Instead of trying to target individual phones and tablets, responsive web design takes a more holistic approach, resulting in a site that renders well in as many browsers as possible.

Click to view rise of "responsive web design" on Google Trends:

It is now practical to create a great, branded, well-designed website that responds to the web browser being used. The site is aware of the size of the browser view port and browser capabilities and adapts the experience instantly to those capabilities.

Behind the Curtain

Under the consistent and professional veneer, the great engineering quality continues. The system uses a fast model view controller framework, robust security standards, and the ability to edit content. By leveraging top tier open source components, less time is spent developing and a better result is achieved.

Device and Browser Agnostic

By making a site that works well without regard to specific size or exact capabilities, problems are avoided and your site will be more effective.

If you are viewing this page on a laptop or office workstation, re-size the browser right now and watch how page elements respond, move and change to maintain a high quality presentation. Note that as you narrow the browser window, the navigation changes to a drop-down menu with a mobile motif. Note that side-by-side elements become stacked elements. See how branding and appearance remain consistent while adapting to a mobile form factor.

Some of the other many standards being met include larger site icons for phones and tablets. A grid system is used to allow for responsive multi-column designs. Forms adapt from desktop to mobile designs. Images size correctly, adapting as the view port changes.

The Stack

Wherein we gingerly stand on the shoulders of giants, agog at the extreme quality of open source software and value of standards.

Having rapidly come of age, HTML5 allows sites to be more expressive, semantic and work better for more people. When combined with CSS3 and JavaScript, HTML5 allows for great results that work on any device.

CSS3 is HTML5's best friend and allows the expressive markup of HTML5 to shine and be beautiful on everything from Dick Tracy's watch to a 100 foot high screen in Times Square. Oh, and to look good on your phone, too.

jQuery helps JavaScript tie in with semantic HTML5 to make a website responsive and interesting without degrading function and appearance.

The lightweight, hierarchical, object oriented, lightweight, model-view-controller framework that works like PHP OOP should work. Kohana allows us to be more efficient and rapidly create robust, secure, high performance applications and sites.

The “P” in a LAMP stack, PHP is messy, powerful and not the latest thing. It is also an enormous standard, actively developed and capable of expressing great websites.

The underlying RDMS that is the standard of the world for web databases.

The most common web server on the planet because of performance, flexibility, scalability, security and much more.

Written by Linus Torvalds, Git has pushed Subversion out of our stack because it is faster, more feature rich and decentralized. Source management is the essential key to quality, development speed and disaster resistance.

Linux is free, fast, secure and easy to maintain.