What is a responsive website? Why is it important? And how to do it.

Today I want to talk about something that is very important for creators to understand, because if you want to be a successful creator, you will probably need to build a website at some point. Whether it is a simple resume website or a full-blown portfolio, having a responsive website is important for your fans.

First, let’s define what a responsive website is.

Responsive web design is an approach to web design aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices (from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones).

If you didn’t understand that, the gist is that a responsive website is easy to use whether you are on a big desktop computer or small mobile device. As you can see in the graphic below, the website looks good on any screen. Typically when going from a larger desktop to a laptop, not much changes. But when going to a mobile device such as a tablet or smartphone, the structure might actually change. 

Menus and other navigation on the website will move around so that instead of all the text becoming really tiny, it becomes a drop down menu at the top of the screen. You can see this in action by making the browser window smaller. Notice how the top menu of VideoSchoolOnline.com looks when the browser window is large. Then make the window really skinny, and you can see the menu become a drop-down menu at the very top.

Below are two images that show this:

You can try this method out with any website to see if the site is responsive or not.

Why is it important to have a responsive website?

As you can imagine (and have probably experienced), it’s really painful to view a normal website on a mobile device if it isn’t responsive. You have to zoom in. It’s easy to press the wrong buttons. Ultimately, visitors will leave your website if it is hard to use. And our goal is to keep people on our websites!

How to easily make your website mobile:

Most modern themes are built to be responsive. If you are building a website with wordpress or drupal, this should be the case. But if you have a an older theme or one that isn’t automatically responsive, the Jetpack Plugin by WordPress has a Mobile theme that turns your theme into an instant and customizable lightweight responsive theme designed for phones and tablets. Install the plugin through your WordPress plugins page, or download and install from here.

FREE Bluehost to WordPress Website Building Course:

I typically give out 5 free coupons at the end of every blog post. But today, this article has a lot to do with my completely free course on how to start a website with Bluehost & WordPress. Click here to enroll for free!

Below, you can watch a video I created on how to create a website in 5 minutes!

Thanks for checking out VideoSchoolOnline.com, I really appreciate it. If you have any comments or thoughts about this post, let us know in the comments below!

Cheers,
Phil