Responsive design and do we really need it?

Almost every clients requirement is responsive web design.

Responsive web design isn’t just stacking up content vertically and making big buttons. That’s the kind of thing design shops talk about when they don’t know what they’re talking about. Anyone who has ever sat through a design school lecture knows you’re always designing with a purpose, always designing for the user.

Responsive web design (RWD) is an approach to web design aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing and interaction experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices (from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones) (Wikipedia)

Responsive design builds on the idea of "One Web". A single URL should serve up content which is appropriate for the device requesting it - whether it's a laptop, tablet, mobile phone, TV, or internet fridge.

The control which designers know in the print medium, and often desire in the web medium, is simply a function of the limitation of the printed page. We should embrace the fact that the web doesn’t have the same constraints, and design for this flexibility. But first, we must 'accept the ebb and flow of things.'

From a user perspective, a site built using responsive design offers a high quality experience. Sites not optimised for mobile devices often display content that is difficult to navigate or too small to read. 

From the point of view of the site owner, a site that uses responsive design only needs to be built once - you don't need to build a web version, a mobile version and a tablet version separately - so this usually saves time and money. 

Plus, any updates that then need to be made only have to be implemented on one site.