Learning Responsive Web Design

Chapter 2. Responsive Content

If you think that HTML and CSS are the most important parts of a website, it’s worth looking at it from a different perspective. Users are coming to your website for the content (and functionality), not to admire the designer’s talent or the developer’s coding skills.

Your website’s users don’t care if your site is responsive, and most of them probably don’t even know what “responsive web design” means. They aren’t thinking about whether they’re using the appropriate device for the site, or whether their screen is going to be the right size. They often don’t even care what your website looks like. They just want to easily get to the information or functionality they need, on whatever device that they happen to have.

That’s why, when you’re designing a website, you should think about your content first.

If you do it the other way around—create a design and try to fit your content in around it—your content will always be stuck in second-class status, and you are less likely to give your users what they need.

With responsive websites, you need to think about content first, so you can make sure your content will work well on small screens. If you’re using existing content from a fixed-width website, you’re going to have a difficult time trying to shoehorn it into a layout for a smaller screen. If you’re starting from scratch with new content, you need to make sure it is optimized for any screen size, not just one screen size.

Content Strategy

The phrase “content ...