This (relative) uniformity in mobile user experience would appear to be wonderful for search engines and developers alike. So what is responsive design? Learn the basics, as well as a few great tools for experimenting with responsive design.

Last week, there was little surprise when Google’s Pierre Far announced responsive design as company’s formal recommendation for mobile delivery. Responsive Web Design is the approach that a design should be flexible enough to adapt to the screen size and platform of the visiting user.
This (relative) uniformity in user experience would appear to be wonderful for search engines and developers alike.
Google was going to face a major conundrum: if every site had an entirely separate experience for mobile and desktop users, which site would actually be the one worthy of the incoming link? Would that rank pass to the mobile site and, if so, how much and why?
This is especially important when considering that there are predictions that mobile usage will overtake desktop usage by 2014. By encouraging developers to create one cogent web experience that adapts to the platform, Google is likely able to preserve many of its link algorithms and — to a certain degree — avoid the daunting burden of attempting to evaluate mobile and desktop versions as separate entities.
For developers, the benefits are also clear: the burden of needing to maintain multiple versions of a website will disappear over time. Additionally, a move to RWD will likely create a “Mobile First” mentality, which will inevitably result in a more clear architecture and user experience that is appropriately weighted.
For a design to be responsive, it typically needs the following three attributes:
The output of these attributes is simple to recognize. Simply take a responsive design such as Starbucks and manually resize the browser. You should notice the screen resizes and adjusts based on the width of the browser.
Below are just a few great tools for experimenting with responsive design.
Responsive Design should help encourage the proliferation of more mobile experiences, especially in the small/medium business world. This unofficial standard will be an important step as it will ensure many small/medium businesses will have a mobile presence without significant additional expense. Whether these presences will be able to monetize will be a different story.
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