Responsive design: One size fits most

Does this screen make my website look fat? The International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), held earlier this month in Las Vegas, is the Fashion Week of the consumer tech industry. If you and your products look hot at the show, mass production and knock offs are sure to follow.

It will take some time for clear winners and losers to emerge for specific products, but the show itself reinforced the importance of responsive website design for making your site look good, regardless of the size of your device.

At CES 2015, screens of various shapes and configurations were embedded into every surface and space imaginable. From hyper-helpful connected refrigerators capable of keeping track of the expiration dates on your milk to creepy gadgets such as camera drones that take aerial selfies, screens were everywhere and the sky - literally - was the limit.

As always, with each new wave of must-have products another era of must-do best practices are established for web developers and designers. In this environment, the concept of responsive design has gained favor over the mobile websites that were de rigueur just a few years ago.

Why responsive design? It provides for an optimal web browsing experience regardless of the device they happen to be using. According to a report by the Cisco Visual Networking Index, traffic from wireless and mobile devices will exceed traffic from wired devices by 2018.

Not so very long ago, websites were designed with either a desktop (wired) or a smartphone (mobile) screen in mind. There really wasn't any in between.

But today the 'wireless or mobile” category could mean anything from a wearable device to a smartphone to a tablet or netbook to an oversized 4K 'Ultra HD” television mounted on the wall.

What does this mean for small and medium-sized businesses? If you jumped on the mobile website bandwagon, you likely created a separate version of your website with less content designed exclusively for use with smartphones.

For more information, users had to go to your main site.

Or, if you stayed with a design originally created for desktop usage, your wireless or mobile users had to navigate your website with a lot of scrolling from one side to the other, and pinching and zooming to adjust for reading.

Not a big deal if you are just looking for a phone number or address, but it gets pretty annoying if you are doing any serious web browsing or research.

Responsive design, on the other hand, responds to the size and shape of the device being used. As a screen gets smaller, the navigation changes to a mobile menu and content is arranged in modules that easily can stack on top of each other for a logical flow of information.

There is no need for a separate mobile website because all parts of your website easily can be viewed within modules that 'stack” themselves in a logical proportion to the size screen.

While most marketing websites don't have to worry about strutting their stuff at the CES, they will need to be able to function in the universe that technological advances create. If you haven't already looked into building a responsive website, 2015 will be the year to do it.

' Comments: Regina Gilloon-Meyer, (319) 368-8530, regina@fusionfarm.com, is a content marketing specialist for Fusionfarm, a part of The Gazette. Twitter handle: @RegiMary