Responsive Web Design - Do you use it? Do you understand it?

I'll be honest, traditionally I've never been a fan of responsive web design. It has been around now for a long time, but it's only relatively recently that I've been won over to it.

For those that don't know, responsive web design is the ability for a web site to automatically scale or display on pretty much any kind of screen size or resolution.

From a high level point of view, it seems obvious and you would wonder why everyone doesn't do it.

But behind the scenes, there have been and are a few limitations with a responsive design, ie where you can put things, and how they will be presented, but most of these can be largely overcome.

Years ago, before mobile websites were critical and mobile eCommerce was a nice to have, responsive designs could be hard work. Browser limitations meant lots of css files telling each and every browser how to behave and present your work of art, meaning lots of extra code and scripts, slowing things down.

That's why we always had dedicated mobile web sites, and dedicated desktop versions. If you access the desktop site on a mobile device, you simply get redirected and vice versa.

Its a good system, still works well, but the downside is you have in affect 2 websites, meaning 2 sets of changes, edits, updates etc.

But modern browsers are now more user friendly and we have taken a decision that anyone still using Internet Explorer 6 or earlier seriously needs to upgrade  

So our developer has won me over, our new project is a fully responsive design and I'm finally a full convert.

I noticed today that the BBC website is in the process of moving over to a responsive design. It's in beta so you can swop between old and new versions.

Here is the new version, viewed from a desktop but minimised so it renders as it would on a mobile, versus the current site on the right, which you have to scroll at the bottom to view any content.

Do you use a responsive design on your website or do you use a dedicated mobile website?

Is anyone still trying make customers and visitors view a desktop website on a smart phone? 

If so, time to think about your digital marketing strategy as more and more of the world move to smaller screens and spend more time accessing content via their smart phones.