Responsive Design
We wanted to do something special with GeorgiaGov - something that no other state site had done.
With Responsive Design, we think we’ve accomplished that.
Responsive Web Design is a new way of presenting web content in which the layout of the site adapts to the device that is accessing it. A person with a large computer monitor will see a different layout than a person using a mobile device.
This is important for two reasons:
- Based on our statistics, our mobile users quadrupled in 2011, which accounted for 5% of all visits. From January to February 2012 alone, it doubled to 10% of all visits.
At the same time, our site is accessed by 191 devices and 86 browsers at 1,750 different resolutions. We knew that we had to accommodate the fast changing trends in devices and browsers. - Our “content first” motto would not work unless we took into account how these devices were accessing our content. For instance, mobile users would care more about searching for a specific task than desktop users, who would have the time and the screen space to browse using a menu.
Responsive design allows the site to resize and reorganize itself based on the browser and device. We designed the site to accommodate three common screen widths:
- Large desktops (960px and above)
- Small desktops & tablet portrait (740px to 960px)
- Mobile (Below 740px)
For mobile users, we reordered some of the functionality, moving search to the top of the page and sending the navigation to the bottom. Why? Because users don’t want to navigate, waiting for each page to load and then clicking on something else. They search.
