Responsive Design has become THE biggest buzzword in web design circles this past year, and with good reason because a well designed responsive website allows mobile visitors to view a beautiful version of your site even if they are on their smartphone. This means you don't need to maintain a separate "mobile version" of your website, things just look awesome for everyone.
View one of our demos on your smartphone or open the demo on your computer and just resize your browser window to watch how the layout changes automatically to "respond" to the new size. Warning, it's addictive!
Gutensite loves responsive design and we just completely redesigned and rebuilt all our default content type pages to be responsive for you! Browse through the pages of our demos to see what these new pages look like for both desktop and mobile devices, e.g. watch the calendar reformat. Even if you don't care about the mobile audience, the new designs are a huge improvement for desktop computer visitors as well.
New Free Responsive Designs
We are also proud to announce 2 brand-new free responsive designs (Olav and Nott) and we have rebuilt many of our existing free templates to be responsive as well (Seven and Seven, French 75, Brockmann, etc).
How to Make Your Site Responsive
If you are using an old version of these free templates, you can easily select the new version from your control panel and your site will instantly be responsive.
If you have a custom design you will need us to rebuild your existing design to be responsive, or have us refresh your custom design (recommended every 1-2 years anyway). As an economical alternative, we can also do a "hybrid" customization of one of our responsive free designs. Once your main design (home page and shell) is responsive, your site will utilize the new responsive content pages and your site will look amazing on mobile devices.
Why Responsive Design is Important
In case you are wondering why this is important, a recent report by Morgan Stanley analysts estimates that by 2015 more people will access the internet through mobile devices than desktop computers. This coincides with the news that for the first time smartphone sales have outpaced desktop computer sales. So if more and more people are visiting your website from their phones, you need to be communicating to them in a way that is still beautiful and optimized.
If your website is not responsive, people will be more frustrated when visiting your site from their smartphones. Alternatively, if your website is responsive, you will stand out from your competitors who probably haven't made the leap yet.