You may have seen a Google blog post quite recently where they recommended that designers make use of responsive web design when they’re creating mobile websites. Other methods of web design will still be supported, but Google’s support of responsive web design adds to the increasing buzz that suggests this could be where the future of design is.

But what is responsive web design? It is essentially a type of design that means you can use the same site for desktops, mobiles and tablets, rather than having to develop a specific site for each one. The site displays across different devices so that it is readable and attractive.

It also has some benefits for SEO. It used to be that if you created a slightly different site for a range of devices to make sure it displayed properly, you would have to optimise each one separately. However, with responsive web design, it doesn’t matter how someone is viewing your website – the pages will have the same URLs on the tablet site as they do on the desktop one.

This means you can also get more useful data out of things such as your Google Analytics report and social media sharing statistics as the information will be consolidated across devices rather than being fragmented. Responsive web design also means that if you make an update to a site, you only have to do it once rather than for each individual version.

Responsive web design can be created using the standard CSS and HTML techniques, so with all of these benefits and the endorsement from Google, now is definitely a good time to start finding out more about it and how it could help your website.

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