Prediction The majority of website projects will adopt responsive web design techniques

It is not really that difficult to see - the writing is clearly on the wall: Responsive is here to stay. The positive consequences beyond just device support is less obvious at first glance... 

Website initiatives tend to start out with grand visions of elaborate designs, huge feature sets and complex requirements. But then when push comes to shove, they shrink towards the lowest common denominator. Many stakeholders would probably argue that responsive web design is a nice feature or add-on - but I think we're looking at a new key ingredient in any new website initiative.

Clearly, the world has moved towards being more mobile, and people interact more and more with their cellphones instead of using regular browsers when consuming content from the internet. This is especially true for socially oriented websites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Youtube. Website projects previously began with a regular full-size browser based website design and then mobile often became an afterthought or an add-on. With responsive design, designers and content strategists now not only have to think in different sizes - PC/Mac (small and large), Tablet, Large Phone, Small Phone and their respective orientations - but they also have think of content order of importance and movement/visibility of content as the device screen size changes.

This is a blessing for existing content management specialists like us at XCentium. When we embark on new website projects with our clients, the conversation quickly turns more towards content modelling and the flow of the user experience. Now, the knowledge from the past 10 years of CMS based projects pays of as our clients now go beyond "Look and Feel" and instead towards "User Experience". Before, a webpage design was weighed by how good it looked to the stakeholders. With responsive web design, everyone in a web design project is forced to think about how the content is consumed by the end user and what is really important on different devices - and for the site in general.

A positive side effect of this shift to responsive, in my opinion, is that all projects become more CMS friendly. Content will be more structured, pages more modularized and the user experience is not something that is forgotten in the midst of style guide discussions and comp revisions. Content is front and center, call outs and modules are suddenly not fillers, but instead important pieces of the website.

For a more in depth discussion on how you could build your next responsive CMS driven project, feel free to contact us here at XCentium.