OUTLAW NEWS
The Outlaw Partners is a fully integrated marketing, consulting, web development, video production and creative media company based in Big Sky. As publisher of the Big Sky Weekly and Mountain Outlaw magazine, we’re using this space to share insight on industry trends and high level creative marketing.
BIG SKY—With new technology being developed daily and a world that’s moving toward mobile web viewing, there are an increasing number of different screen sizes and types.
Think about it: We’ve got the laptop for home, the desktop for work, the iPad for the commute and the smart phone for everything in between. In the past, websites were not built to appear on many different screens.
That’s where responsive web design comes in.
Responsive web design is a cutting-edge web technology that adapts a website’s resolution to fit varying screen sizes, which allows for easy and streamlined viewing on any device.
The rationale behind moving to responsive web design is threefold: The internet is moving toward mobile, building different websites for different devices is expensive, and responsive web design provides consistent user experience.
“Essentially, responsive web design creates a single site that adjusts its look for each screen resolution,” said Sean Weas, Outlaw’s web designer. “So, with new improvements in web technology, the website is essentially able to ask the device that is viewing it ‘how big is your screen?’ and the resolution of the website can change depending on the screen.”
By 2014, an estimated 70 percent of web traffic will be mobile, and the desktop will no longer be the way most visitors interact with a website.
In 2010, websites had a 3.8 percent mobile viewing, according to web traffic monitoring of 40 highly viewed websites done by web news source visul.ly. By 2011 that mobile viewing had jumped to 9.4 percent, a 147.4 percent increase.
“In the past, to fit all different screen types, [web designers] would have to make three different websites to fit different screen sizes,” Weas said.
By building one website that can comprehend any screen type, responsive web design is cutting back on web design workload while maximizing on costumer and viewer experience.
Using responsive web design, The Outlaw Partners are not only enhancing their own work but costumer experience as well. That means if you buy a website from Outlaw it will look good on any screen, Weas said.
“Outlaw is staying on the cutting edge, making sure we are delivering a consistent experience across all browser types, which adds a lot of value to our clients while also making our development process as streamline as possible.”
Along with responsive websites for clients, Outlaw’s new Explore Big Sky news site, which is set to launch in July, will also incorporate responsive web technology.
For more information about responsive websites or how to incorporate this cutting edge technology into your business, contact The Outlaw Partners at media@theoutlawpartners.com.
