Re: Retrofitting Responsive Design on an Existing Website

[Alen]

With RWD you have to think beyond changing bunch of widths to make your design “responsive”.

Your current content hierarchy might not make any sense for responsive layout. Your whole content strategy needs to change. Think about it, you are responding to screen sizes of ~ 1200px to ~ 320px. So for example, your sidebar at 1200px is above the fold, now at 320px it’s buried all the way on the bottom, because content has shifted. Is this content important to your visitors? If yes, is it the best idea to shift this content to the bottom on mobile devices?

What about images? Are they responsive too? Are you serving smaller sizes to mobile devices? What about performance and load times? What about modularity and expansion? Are new features going to be easily integrated? Ect! With RWD there so many things to think about. It’s not just about changing px’s to %’s.

In my opinion, if possible, rewrite from scratch. It will save you so much patch work down the line.