Responsive Design

User Experience

Making sure the experience your users have is consistent, easy, and enjoyable is a big deal. You only have a few seconds to make a good impression, and a site people have to pinch and zoom their way through is the fastest way to make a bad one. Most of your visitors will be on a phone, and the monthly report we set up shows you the exact split for your own site. Keeping that experience consistent isn’t a detail, it’s the whole first impression.

Speed & Efficiency

Outside of how a site is seen and explored, building from responsive, modular sections greatly improves efficiency. It lets us update an entire site quickly, keeps our code clean and easy to manage, and the lighter the code and content, the faster your site runs. Every photo in a page section is served at the size that slot actually needs, so a phone downloads a phone-sized image instead of the full-size one meant for a desktop.

Conversion & Knowledge

Business needs are another primary reason for building mobile friendly. Somebody standing in a parking lot looking for your hours shouldn’t have to hunt for a phone number. When your address, hours, and contact button are sized for a thumb and sitting where people expect them, more of those visits turn into a call, and the ones who do reach out already know what they’re looking for.

Accessibility

Accessibility can be another great reason to build responsive. Not all industries have strict guidelines for accessibility, but building with it in mind ensures that no matter who the user is, they’ll be able to navigate your site and get the information they need. The icon-only controls we ship (carousel arrows, the mobile menu button, the theme toggle) each carry a written label behind them, so a screen reader says "Next slide" or "Open menu" instead of just "button."

Lowers Cost

Last but not least, let’s not forget the cost of building a website. We do our absolute best to keep production costs down, and one of the primary reasons we can is responsive design. Responsive means less code variety, less code variety means more control, more control means easier editing, and easier editing means fewer problems. It’s the best way to build a modern site that works for you without spending your hard-earned money on a product you don’t need.

Flexible Layouts

We build our sections with every feature (buttons, text blocks, image sections) they might need already in them, so one can be dropped into a new design and simply work. They’re also all laid out in ten different screen widths from 400 pixels wide for a small phone up to 2000 pixels wide for a larger desktop monitor. This gives us an enormous amount of freedom when laying out website pages, and it helps each website feel unique and work well.

Media Queries

In programming, we use something known as media queries to apply specific styles or changes based on a device or environment’s characteristics. A media query is a rule that says "when the screen is this wide, do this instead." If an element needs to be capped at 250 pixels on the smallest phones and step up from there, that’s one rule, and it holds everywhere that element gets used. Because all ten of our screen widths are named and defined in one place, every section changes at the same points instead of each one guessing where to break. That’s what keeps the code clean and keeps your site behaving the same way from one device to the next.

Responsive Content

How well your site reads comes down to two things: whether the text is legible and on topic, and whether or not the images are worth looking at. On our end, we make sure the fonts used on your site stand out well, have enough weight and contrast with the background, and are on brand to ensure they’re legible and consistent. For photos, our system makes as many as six smaller versions to help with the different screen sizes they may be viewed on. Also, your JPEGs and PNGs each get a lighter WebP copy that is used to help keep pages loading quickly.

This allows you to create the content you need free of any concern that it might not be presented well. You still need to cater your content to your audience, keep it short and to the point, and make sure it’s original, but on our end we go above and beyond to make sure the magic happens that makes all of your content look amazing.

Design

Before we ever type a single line of code, we first design the sections that go into our websites. We use web design software in order to prototype the different designs we are working on, helping us test them across all screen sizes. Only when we are one-hundred percent sure a section will work will we move it on to programming.

Programming

All approved sections/designs get recreated in code, and that’s when the magic happens. We use all of our web skills and knowledge to streamline the coding process, implementing only what’s necessary and works into everything we do. By the end, we’ve got a working model that satisfies client needs as well as lives up to our high standards.

Implementation

The final step of our process is where we take newly created sections and use them on client websites. This helps build our library of available designs, giving us more freedom and variety to make your site unique. It also means that when we deliver a working model for you to review, it can work almost identical to when the site will go live, nixing any concerns of functionality or layout before a user ever even sets eyes on the site.