What is “Mobile Responsive”?
Whenever tech companies come out with new phones or tablets, public reaction often centers on one thing: the size of the screen. It feels like every new generation of smartphone is changing the dimensions of the device, making them slightly larger than the one that came before.
Thank goodness each succeeding change doesn’t mean radically altering your website. In fact, mobile browsing in general doesn’t require drastically different solutions anymore. It used to be that websites would have a copy made, a specific mobile version for phone browsers. This meant another domain name, another level of maintenance for new and different phone sizes, and reduced search functions. These days, new technology lets websites adjust automatically. This is called mobile responsive.
Specifically, mobile responsive means that a website can adapt or “respond” to the varied screen sizes of phones and tablets. Content, like pictures and text, will adjust and resize to fit whatever device on which the content is being read, changing for resolution, scripting abilities, etc. It’s a function that often comes built in to the website. All you have to do is make sure it’s there for you!
What are important for mobile responsive are the right HTML and CSS elements. Proportion-based grids, flexible images and media queries all are needed to make the website as mobile responsive as possible. They allow the site to automatically feel what the screen size is, changing it to suit the purposes of the smartphone or tablet.
To do this, certain frameworks are crucial to ensuring your website is mobile responsive. It’s possible to do it yourself, or use a style sheet like W3.CSS or Bootstrap. These let content rendering change to different conditions across a wide variety of browsers and devices, without adding the extra burden of a separate mobile version of your website.
Why is it important to ensure your site is mobile responsive? It’s just simply thinking about the future. More and more content is being consumer on mobile devices. It important to care and think about it because you don’t want to put an extra burden on your audience – a responsive website is a versatile one, and one where the responsibility to adapt is not on your viewer, but naturally built into the website’s design.
So, you think you’re up to standard when it comes to mobile responsive? Test your website on a site like Mobiletest.me to see just how your site holds up. If you need to put in the work, don’t worry. If you have access to your HTML, you can do it yourself! http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_responsive.asp If not, make sure you have the changes made for you by someone in the know. Web pages have to look good, regardless of how the viewer is looking at them.
Think about how often you do simple web searches on your phone. Think about the current generation’s dependence on mobile browsing. It’s not hard to see just how crucial mobile responsive will be for the future, so get caught up now!
