Earlier today, I caught a quick post to the Orange County WordPress group by Priscilla Christian:
This guy is harshing my (responsive design) mellow. What do you all think?
http://www.webdesignshock.com/responsive-design-problems/
Considering I gave a quick chat on responsive design last night at our meetup, I wanted to delve in to the article and see what the big fuss was all about. Well, it turns out that several of the points were (rightly) targeted at load times and page optimization. Responsive design using media queries implies that you’ve using “display: none” or “visibility: hidden” to limit what’s being shown on the page – but as the authors pointed out – that doesn’t prevent the data from being downloaded. Hence, the bandwidth problem. The page might appear less bulky, but in reality the device / browser is loading just as much data.
So, that got me thinking about load times for mobile devices. If you want to reduce load speed, wouldn’t the easiest solution just be to load less stuff?
My solution is pretty straightforward, relatively un-tested, and I’m certain it’s not a good fix (for reasons I’m not even clever enough to think of) – but for the moment I think it’s not a bad fix. Keep reading…
Tags: responsive design, theme design, WordPress
Mentioned in this Post: @pcgs