Web design is a flexible, consistently evolving medium. There are a variety of different ways to accomplish the same goal; there are always new techniques and best practices on the horizon; web design projects can range from the tiny (one-page websites) to the huge (multi-page CMS-powered websites). Any web design freelancer or web design firm knows the range of features, and their corresponding costs, that can be built into their projects – dynamic content, jQuery effects, advanced layouts, etc – and the question of what should be a standard vs. what should be a feature is constantly evolving too.
With all that in mind, the newest web design technique on the block is responsive web design. If you’re not clear on what responsive web design means, read this article. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
Alright, now that you’re back, let’s get to the million-dollar question that I was discussing with some fellow nerdy web friends over beers: should responsive web design be a standard for your web design business, or should it be a feature that can be added on (like power windows in a car)? Let’s explore the arguments.
Argument: It Should be a Standard
The main argument for “Responsive web design should be a standard” – aka every site you or your business builds from here on out should be responsive – is that it seems to be, without question, the way the industry is heading. The amount of web-powered devices out there, and their specs, is almost impossible to count. There are iOS devices, sure, but there’s also a litany of tablets and smartphones powered by Android with a myriad of screen sizes and resolutions. With that in mind, we can’t realistically serve up a completely different version of a website based on detecting the OS or browser anymore; responsive design allows us to detect the browser viewport window and serve up a modified layout based off of one website design. By and large, responsive design seems like the only realistic way at present to manage the huge range of devices, users and browsers accessing the web.
So if responsive design is the way of the future – and for the sake of argument, let’s say it is – shouldn’t we start building every site this way? Shouldn’t we strive to stay on top of the trends? Shouldn’t we be future-proofing our builds for our clients? Shouldn’t we be taking responsibility, as web professionals, to serve up the best user experience possible on every device and browser? Those are good questions that form a good argument; one that’s hard to refute.
Now let me try to do just that.
Argument: It Should be a Feature
Yes, people are accessing the internet in ways like never before: on desktops with huge monitors, on netbooks, on ten-inch tablets, on seven-inch tablets, on four-and-a-half inch smartphones. This boom in tech is why responsive design has emerged.
But with that boom in tech has come some amazing mobile browsers; any well-designed, non-responsive site looks great in mobile Safari. Yes, you have to double-tap and zoom in. Yes, it serves up content that, in some cases, is useless and weighty to user on a mobile device. A nicely designed, non-responsive site isn’t the best user experience by any means, but I would put forth that it isn’t a bad user experience either.
On top of that, designing, building and testing a responsive site takes considerably longer than doing the same for a static site. Fluid layouts means more layout break points; serving up specific layouts to specific devices (eg. desktop browser, tablet in portrait mode, smartphone) means more wireframes, more mockups, and more testing. Using advanced web design techniques – the foundation of responsive web design is the CSS3 media query declaration – means even more testing and problem-solving on older browsers. Yes, responsive design takes much more time, and we didn’t even touch on maintenance or dealing with a client-handled CMS.
We all know that, in the web design/development world, time = money. If you make responsive web design a standard for your business, you have to raise your prices to reflect all the additional time a responsive site takes over a static one. Depending on where you sit in your market, raising your prices may push you into a different range of client; perhaps a range you’d prefer not to be in. It may also push you out of the market altogether. This is the strongest argument against responsive as a standard.
So maybe responsive web design should be a feature. Maybe you don’t want your prices to push you into the next range of client, or out of your market. Maybe it’s something you don’t have the means to take on for every client, based on your workload. Maybe responsive web design is something you articulate the benefits & drawbacks of, offer it as a feature for $XXXX more dollars to your client, and let them make the decision based on their budget, business needs and website goals. By making responsive web design a standard, instead of a feature, you take the ability to choose out of your clients hands.
Pros & Cons
Let’s break down my rambling into digestible points.
Responsive Design as a Standard: Pros
- you are offering the most up-to-date web design/development practices available
- the sites you build are going to look amazing on virtually any platform
- you may get a potential leg-up on your competition
- you may make more money on less projects
Responsive Design as a Standard: Cons
- you might price yourself out of your market/current range of client
- you will have to take on fewer projects to accommodate for longer project lengths
Responsive Design as a Feature: Pros
- you are offering your clients choice
- you have an overall shorter development cycle (on average, accounting for non-responsive sites)
- you don’t risk pricing yourself out of the market
Responsive Design as a Feature: Cons
- you are offering your clients choice (yes, this is both pro & con)
- you may rarely build responsive sites, and thus fall behind technically
- you may end up doing more projects at a lower per-project cost
I’m sure I’ve missed some here and there (feel free to throw in your two cents in the comments), but I feel like that’s an alright summary of the pros and cons of each path. It’s important to not only look at how many pros and cons are there for each, but also to weigh each pro and each con. For example, offering the most advanced dev techniques out there is a huge pro. But pricing yourself out of your market is a devastating con.
The Answer
….is “I don’t know”. Or to be more specific, “it’s up to you” – I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. I know that Paper Leaf, at present, is offering responsive web design as a feature, not a standard. The main reason? We don’t want to raise our base prices to the extent required to compensate for the additional time responsive web design takes. We make a point to clearly articulate the fact that responsive web design is the way of the future, a better choice, etc to our clients, but ultimately we leave the decision up to them. A custom website is a big investment as-is. Some people take the responsive route, some don’t. Perhaps at some point in the future, however, responsive website design will be a built-in feature for us.
What are your thoughts? Responsive design: standard or feature?
Responsive Design is a technique, not a standard. If you are looking to use it as a company best practice, by all means it’s a good way to go – just remember that the way to a better future also means not sticking to one practice only, but allowing the context of the given app or site you’re working on (audience, scope, real as opposed to perceived needs, scale) to drive the technique you use. Standardizing on technique is almost as dangerous as vendor-lockin in that regard.
Hi Molly,
Thanks for commenting – you definitely make some good points. I agree with you that every project should be evaluated on its individual needs, as opposed to “forcing” responsive design (or any other technique). I probably wasn’t clear enough on that in the article. Appreciate the input.
As a content creator, I want to create content one place. Having a web site and a mobile site means there are two places I have to keep content current, correct and consistent. At some point, if your web site is not responsive it will just be poor design. In Aug. we did a complete redesign and created all new content focusing on IT support (& some news) for our users (students, faculty and employees). Two weeks ago, our site became responsive. so our users can find the IT support they need on any device they are using. Check your analytics-what % are mobile users? Is it really worth it to pay for a mobile site, when a responsive site meets all needs.
Best article I have read yet on RWD!
Hi Tammy,
Thanks for the kind words, and great point on managing content. It’s much easier to manage one piece of content over two, which is a potential benefit of RWD for sure. Further to both yours and Molly’s comments, I agree – know your audience, check your % of mobile visitors, and use that along with other measurables to determine if responsive is worth the investment for you. It’s likely that a mobile site will cost more (or the same) as a responsive site (project/site dependent, of course, but generally speaking), and you might have to manage double the content. Thanks for reading!
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When I quote, I try to provide the basic, recommended, and awesome options – you could put responsive under recommended and awesome, or just awesome. Then your clients are educated as to what’s included and frankly, most people pick the middle option.
Thanks for sharing. I definitely agree with the post.
Good article with good points. We are offering RWD as a feature right now and only to the clients whose project (potentially) needs it.
Leaving the choice completely to the client can lead to some troubles (or misunderstandings) since most of the time our clients do not really understand why RWD costs more: they just want their website look “the same” in every browser (old dispute every webdesigner knows so well) and now on every device!
Even if we try to explain usually at the end “money wins” and they pick up the cheapest solution; it’s sad maybe but this is our statistic.
Thanks for the comment Federica. Sounds like your approach is the same as our approach (and the results sound similar too).
Yeah, I think that’s a good approach Dana. Worthwhile to be able show some examples to boot.
Well said. Embracing RWD is one of my big personal wins this year as a developer. I think that it is most definitely a feature and not a standard since not every web site is necessarily able to adapt to responsive design in a seamless manner. I wouldn’t tell a prospect that RWD is a standard because it implies that it will work with every project, which of course isn’t necessarily true. What should be standard is our eagerness to simplify our processes and deliver the best results we can. RWD in a lot of cases definitely achieves this.
“What should be standard is our eagerness to simplify our processes and deliver the best results we can.” – Very well said, FredTheWebGuy. Thanks for reading!
Responsive Design wird in Zukunft zwangsläufig zum Standard werden. Allerdings bleibt fraglich ob jede Seite dieses Feature haben muss.
As a web designer I tried to embrace RWD this year as well and it’s a great technique in my opinion. However, I don’t want to raise my base prices as well for now and let the clients decide wether they’ll need a feature like this or not even though I started to recommend it to any of them already.
In the future, I’m pretty sure that this topic gets even more important especially considering that the amount of screen sizes and devices will increase and so it becomes more and more difficult to create a website which displays its content perfectly on any of these without powerful concepts like media queries.
Interesting article. In my own work I consider RWD a standard, rather than a feature – when given the choice, none of my clients has chosen a non-responsive approach. Yes, it does take longer to develop a responsive site, but not as long as some people seem to imagine. It’s something I discuss with each client at the outset of a project, and factor into the project scope and quote.
Of course, if a design is not suited to a RWD approach, then I’ll go fixed width – this usually only happens when the site is designed by someone else, and RWD has not been taken into consideration by the designer.
[...] 14. RESPONSIVE WEB DESIGN: STANDARD OR FEATURE? [...]
Good article,
We use to start doing Responsive web design, but at the end it is more convenient and efficient to do Standard since it is easy to put together all the SEO, Cross-Plataform, Social Media and Accessibility components by just following standards.
Great article, thanks for sharing. A few of our clients have already noticed a need for Responsive Web Design. In our opinion, this will be a BIG trend for web design for 2012.
[...] 14. RESPONSIVE WEB DESIGN: STANDARD OR FEATURE? [...]
Hey there! This is my first comment here so I just wanted to give a quick shout out and say I truly enjoy reading through your articles. Can you suggest any other blogs/websites/forums that deal with the same topics? Thanks for your time!