While often ballyhooed as a panacea for the wide variety of computing screen sizes real estate professionals must accommodate online, one-size-fits all websites are actually a trade-off that often end up being more trouble than they’re worth.
The problem: These “responsive websites,” as they’re known – or sites that auto-sense a device’s screen size, and then respond by reconfiguring text and graphics to fit that screen size – often render on desktop PCs with ridiculously large text and other over-blown features that are tedious to wade through.
The impetus behind the approach makes sense. Designers using responsive design take great pains to ensure that anything that appears on a responsive website will look good on the smallest of screens – even a smartphone.
“Responsive website design has become the new standard,” says Ulf Lonegren, co-owner of Roketto, a Web design and marketing agency, based in Kelowna, British Columbia. “We won’t build a website any other way — it just doesn’t make sense anymore.” Adds Laura Machanic, CEO of New Target, a Web design and marketing firm: “We recommend ‘Mobile First’ as a strategy, forcing everyone to consider their most valuable, actionable content and work it into their mobile sites.”
