In addition to poster-sized headlines, you’ll often find that responsive websites make generous use of wide swaths of blank space – space that requires repeated spins on your mouse to scroll through when using a desktop, but often looks just fine on a smartphone. Plus, responsive websites that need to feature a great deal of text – including property descriptions, company backgrounders, customer testimonials and the like – also look more like train wrecks than anything else on a desktop screen.
One glaring example: on a desktop, the text on a responsive website often runs the full length of a 23” screen, so it will shrink down nice-and-tidy when viewed on a smartphone screen. For the mobile user, that’s convenient, since the responsive website reconfigures text margins to fit a palm sized screen.
But for the desktop user, trying to read a sentence 23 inches long is not nearly as much fun – unless you’re a giraffe.
“I have been to many websites by big companies and they have not adopted for responsive design,” says Sean B. Jamshidi, owner of DesignFacet, a Web design firm based in Toronto. “There must be a reason why.”
