Responsive Design & WordPress Themes

Posted by on Oct 3, 2011 in Blog, themes | 0 comments

Responsive Design & WordPress Themes

Responsive web design is a term that describes an approach toward designing for screen sizes as apposed to designing for devices.

“Back in the day”, when there were only a few smart phones and very few other web page viewing devices, it made sense to design a completely different theme for the iPhone, blackberry, or the handfull of other mobile devices; but, this is a new day!

Different screen sized web page viewers are pouring into the market, design for them or be left behind. The http://WordpressWebmaster.net recommends leaving the mobile plugins like WPtouch behind and moving on to “Responsive Web Design”…like yesterday! If you have not done this yet, don’t feel bad; we are just beginning to move our blog into a responsive design theme too. Watch the video and review the resource lists below:

Dale at BNC offered some very good comments regarding the validity of still sticking with WPtouch for mobile delivery. Below is Dale’s stated response which I greatly appreciate:
***BNC Response Below***

Responsive themes are great! It’s the ideal delivery, really. But not all themes can be responsively altered- and it’s quite a few years away before responsive designs become the norm. WPtouch fills the gap here. And it’s not just for a handful of devices— WPtouch works on over 100 devices these days, and serves mobile pages to roughly 85% of mobile device traffic on the web. And while responsive designs are ideal, they’re not always implemented well, and can still be cumbersome. Serving desktop sized content and stripping away elements with CSS doesn’t stop most resources from being sent to the devices. I think there’s room for, and times where these different approaches are more appropriate. I’m not sure there’s an easy solution for a responsive design plugin- if you’re modifying the desktop theme to be presented on mobile you have to know what the elements are in the theme to adjust them.
The resource links showed in the video are listed below:

Resource: Responsive Design Articles

Resource: Responsive WP Themes

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