Cisco has projected that by 2015 as much as 75-85% of all internet/web traffic will be through mobile devices. Let that sink in. As Jeffrey Zeldman put it, “There’s a plethora of devices out there with widely differing abilities – it’s never been more confusing or challenging to create great [web] interfaces that work across them all.” Although web analytics provides us with some user/traffic data, we’re increasingly finding ourselves in a constantly changing and fluctuating environment. Because of this challenge, Zeldman predicts that we can expect Responsive Web Design (RWD) to play a big role in 2012 and coming years, “bridging the enormous gulfs between platforms.”
At its core, the responsive web design strategy is focused on knowing what device, network connection a person is using, as well as their environment/context when they access your content, and then delivering just what is needed (and no more) to fulfill this request for this person’s circumstance. So it is about adopting a more flexible, device-agnostic approach to designing for the web. This, along with recognizing that the type of content users interact with needs to adjust as fluidly as the size and design of the site itself.
This somewhat abstract-sounding philosophy/approach can appear rather simple and straight forward. Though with fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries being the tools we have available to reach our goal, it can get very complicated, fast.
On Thursday, June 7, Robert Kraus and Billy Hylton, along with others, will be leading a round table discussion on this topic and we want to hear your thoughts & views. So, please come and join us, as together we endeavor to investigate and better understand just what this brave new web world of ‘responsive web design’ and ‘progressive enhancement’ means to/for us, and how it is going to change the way we work in in our worlds of content management, site design, and web development. What should we be doing here at Carolina?
Resources:
A few resources on this subject that I have found particularly helpful, for those that wish to begin their investigations now:
Responsive Web Design Primer.doc
Responsive Web Design Mtg Agenda
www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design/
www.abookapart.com/products/responsive-web-design
http://adactio.com/journal/4443/
www.netmagazine.com/features/21-top-tools-responsive-web-design