08 Jun
A Responsive Web – Why not?Instead of asking yourself why you want to make your next website responsive you should be asking the question “Why not?”. Is it really that hard to design a site that will scale and look nice in most any resolution? Isn’t it your job as a web developer / designer to create an experience on the web that works for anyone viewing it? The, near, entire mobile market has some form of web browsing available and that means a good chunk of your traffic may well come from a less then optimal viewport. So why make a user pinch, zoom, and pan all over your unresponsive site?
Over at Themify.me we’ve been trying to answer that question “Why not?” for the past few months. So, Nick has chosen to agree with that rhetorical question and begin integrating responsive solutions into our themes. The great thing about this approach is that not one of the themes created, since this change, has taken longer to develop. We plan, from the outset, to build in that fluidity and, along the way, we make calculated decisions that create a beautiful and responsive result.
For the most part, we rely solely on media queries. Many will protest that using media queries to provide responsive layouts isn’t the proper way to “optimize” for mobile, specifically. Of course, this would mean you end up creating two versions of your layout and end up having to include some sort of user agent detection, manage assets… etc. This isn’t something I personally want to worry about unless its of utter importance or the circumstance requires it. For Nick and myself, at least, we think we’ve found a nice balance between a timely development process and functional, fluid layouts (with the help of media queries). Sure, it’s always nice to manage resources and performance on specific devices but when you’re deploying to thousands of users, with a certain level of X factor baked in, you tend to lean to the side of optimal development practices.
Either way you slice it, I hope people continue riding this responsive wave right into the ocean! Hang a loogie at the pier bro! 
tags: mobile / responsive / themify
1 comments
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Posted: Oct 27, 2011
Loving the responsive layouts on those WP themes. Need to build some fluidity into my next web project =)
