How many of your website’s visitors will be frequenting your site using PCs and MACs? How about netbooks? How many will be accessing it using a Kindle? Or an iPhone, iPad, or iPad mini? Or on their Blackberry? Or on other miscellaneous mobile devices with varying screen sizes and resolutions?

You could, of course, use current trends and the things you know about your target audience to speculate…and then purchase web design expertise and implementation for each, or choose those which are expected to be the most heavily used and concentrate on web design for those devices. If that doesn’t sound daunting enough, consider what’s to be done as new devices hit the market; and when older ones are phased out of popularity.

Daunting. Exhausting. Expensive. These are just a few of the adjectives that might be used to describe the process of web design geared specifically toward particular devices. When mobile devices first hit shelves, it seemed more do-able – after all, there were only a few major devices to choose from; however, today’s mobile scene is far too complicated to try to keep up with users of each one.

The concept of responsive web design says that web design experts shall increasingly become more adept at creating web designs that are flexible enough to track users’ behaviour as well as devices used in order to automatically adjust images, layouts, grids, media queries, and scripting – making device customisation easier to implement and simpler to use.

Responsive web design is an evolving art, but here is what we, Impulse, know now: Some mobile devices’ displays are square. Others present websites in landscape orientation, others in portrait orientation, and yet others allow users to toggle between the two. Web design experts can design for each one, but then they are faced with the challenge of using those orientations to design for a number of different screen sizes. Plus, as stated earlier, new devices continue to be introduced and older ones virtually disappear from use.

Rather than keeping up manually, we agree that it’s best to keep up flexibly. Responsiveness in web design today includes automatically adjusted images, unbreakable layouts, and elastic grids. Only a few years ago, the best we could hope for were adjustable text placement and some pixel wiggle room. Images were saboteurs of flexible design…and that only considers a jump from a full-size screen to a tablet. Forget about smart phones.

This is good news for you, the web design consumer; however, we at Impulse highly recommend that you ask for samples of work before hiring any web design firm. Why? Just because web design tools are allowing for more responsiveness doesn’t mean that every web design operative knows how to use them to create a product that WOWs in any format. Logo warping, undesirable image cropping, and distorted text can result. Check out our web design creations, or simply call 01904 430 666 or get it touch via the contact us page.