How a Responsive Web Design Gives You an Agile Process

If you read our blog, read articles like this, or have a ton of mobile traffic coming to your site, you already know that making your website responsive is a good idea. In my last post, I even went through some of the other benefits of responsive design for your site. But what you might not know is that by making your responsive website, you’re also making your process agile. At least when it comes to the development of your online presence.

By standard definition, being agile means you have the ability to move easily and quickly. Putting that in perspective of your business, company, or web project means the same thing. And doesn’t that sound great — working on a project that is quick and easy? I know what you’re thinking — how does making your site responsive make your business move quickly? Or easily? After all, making that site responsive probably wasn’t either of those things. But once you have a responsive site, things will start to change.

To begin with, you now have just one website. That website is presenting your story fully and beautifully on any device your readers use to find it. You don’t have to launch and maintain a mobile-only site next to your main site. Or a TV-only site as gaming consoles and other devices bring the web to TVs. When a new device or display size comes out, you don’t need to build a new site because you already support it. You already have your solution in place. What’s more agile than solving the problem before it happens? And because it’s one site, you don’t have to update your content in multiple places when you want to make a change. Make the change once and it’s instantly visible on all of those devices.

Responsive web design also brings agility to your content creation process. Your design gives you the building blocks (like Lego bricks) to quickly and easily put together content. These pieces are available to your designers, developers, and content creators to use when making changes. These groups are able to do their jobs quickly and easily – just by having a strong responsive foundation in place. You may even have created a style guide like Starbuck’s when building your responsive website. This gives your content creators all of the tools they need right at their fingertips. Your developers and designers won’t even have to be involved if the content fits in the existing visual language and can be entered into your content management system. The artists responsible for writing your content can have the tools to do it by themselves.

A final way responsive web design helps with your agility is in the way it opens you up to making continual improvements. Not getting the engagement you want on a page? Reorganize your content to make it more prominent. Think two columns will work better than three? Change your column widths. Or maybe you just want to change your colors to reflect the upcoming holiday season? Go for it. (Just don’t tell your designer I told you it was OK.) The bottom line is, you’re more willing to experiment and improve when it takes days instead of weeks to make the changes.

Have you had positive, or negative, improvements to your agility with your recent responsive projects? Share your thoughts on Twitter using #AgileRWD. Or if you want to get into this responsive and agile web world, please contact us. We love making responsive websites.