Building fully responsive websites is not just a trend anymore – it’s a necessity. Think about the great variety of screen sizes visitors might use to access your website, and you will realize it for yourself. Responsive designs that behave well on any screen size and resolution are a necessity, and they are good for SEO as well, making websites easier to maintain and optimize – but only if done right. Below I will present you three websites – one using a good responsive design, one using a bad one, and in contrast, one that does not use it at all.
1. The Good: TileApp.com
Tile is a “smart companion for all the things you can’t stand to lose” – an upcoming gadget you can attach to various things and it helps you find them with your phone. It promises a series of handy features, like a cloud-based community, easy sharing, and similar. And it has a great website.
TileApp.com is built using the best practices of responsive design. It not just rearranges the text to fit your screen, but it also scales it to fit on any screen size, and so does it with its backgrounds, making in readable and accessible on any device, from the oldest smartphone to the largest Smart TV. The effort put into building this website was rewarded with a Honorable Mention at the 2014 Awwwards.
2. The Bad: Any unresponsive website
Although all web designers use the same internet as we do, and they are surely aware of the actual trends, most websites out there are still only working right on a single screen resolution. Ignorant or unaware designers create websites that will look good on most monitors, but they usually ignore both bigger and smaller screens in the process. Sometimes it’s their customers’ fault – they don’t realize the emergence of mobile, and only think of people behind standard monitors as their customers. And this is bad. Hopefully this attitude will soon disappear, allowing for the internet to adapt to our devices completely.
