Today’s websites have to work harder than ever. Not only do they support more stages within the sales funnel, including purchasing and customer support, they also must look good on screens from 4-inch smart phones to 23+inch desktop monitors and everything in between. Almost half of adults in the U.S. own a smartphone, one third own tablets*. Businesses are seeing that an increasing percentage of traffic to their sites is coming from mobile viewers.

Businesses are also seeing the advantages of “catching” mobile eyeballs: A brand that offers an easy-to-read site about their products has an advantage when a consumer is looking up information on their phone while standing in the store. A realtor whose site looks great on a smartphone can entice drive-by home-shoppers better than a realtor who depends on a phone call or, worse, expects the buyers to remember an address until they get home.

Because it would be cumbersome (and annoying for the user) to create unique sites or apps for every device out there, Web developers are increasingly adopting an approach popularly called “Responsive Design”. This is the technique of building a site such that it automatically adjusts the content being delivered to the size of the screen it is being viewed on.

More than scroll bars

Responsive design means more than offering the viewer a scroll bar to access content that is wider than the screen! A truly responsive design will collapse columns, reorder content, and take into consideration the limitations of making selections with a finger rather than a mouse. Features such as drop-down menus and mouse-over features also need to be re-imagined on a mobile device. Marker Seven’s design team plans for responsive design by creating simple, fluid designs with seamless break points that will look the best on the most common resolutions.