Responsive themes - general question.

OK, just starting the process of migrating to Opencart. Used a simple direct payment cart up to now, then had the term responsive themes thrown in my general direction.

If I have read it right on Wiki, responsive means it will display on all types of phones and ipads as well etc. I have downloaded a few free themes off here including a responsive one 'yooresponsive'. My question - is all this responsive thing hype, or is it of real benefit in site design and something I should seriously consider implementing? My own existing sites seem to display ok on my Android smart phone, on my Kindle Fire and on my partners iphone.

Any advice would be greatly received, as the subject of responsive web sites is a whole new subject to me.

Thanks...

responsive theme isn't a must, but seems to be the trend recently. If your targeted customers aren't always on phone / is alright with zooming in on your website when on their phone, a normal theme will do. However, most themes on themeforest are responsive nowadays, with almost the same pricing as the non-responsive ones.

Thanks for your reply 'MarketInSG'. I am currently playing around with a few free themes, including one responsive theme to get a feel for design on my new sites. I'll probably upload a couple onto my development site to see what they look like on mobiles and Kindle.

Thanks again .......

do something that suits your target customers most and not do something that is the trend. That's what I always feel

You can see a practical effect between websites that have outboard left and right margins of empty real estate that is there unless someone is looking at in on a narrow monitor. Modern laptops are considerably wider than the former 1024x768 standard. When width is set to a fixed value in pixels, the website shows that wide and the outboard empty swaths appear on laptop machines, where they are a bit of an annoyance, actually. When width is set to 100% or for the sake of margins and padding to somewhere in the 90s, then both laptop and limited desktop machines see the website full-width. The resizing may or may not pose a few hurdles for design to accommodate dynamic widths, and it's worth proofing the outcome by viewing it at narrow and wide widths. That can be done by several means easily on modern machines.

As for what is "in" or not that is or is not "responsive" consider the context of changes through time. See
http://forum.opencart.com/viewtopic.php ... 03#p406550

It's up to you to decide how to satisfy which machines how for what reasons. You don't necessarily need or even want every whizbang responsiveness that has been or will be imagined.

Thanks Butte. My current instant pay cart is a fixed width, which cannot be altered as that is fixed by the software (Coffeecup cart creator pro). My Zen powered shop prior to that had a fluid width template I could tweak through the template, but zen carts suffer from an overly long checkout process and a complex file structure.

I have great hopes for Opencart though..

OC already kicks out their slats. Among body, container, and judiciously minded divisions, master and subordinate widths can all be fluid or mixed. Whether widths be set fluid as percentages (usually best in the 90s rather than 100) or set fixed as pixels (then usually favoring 1024 crt displays), the nesting of widths can be controlled easily in OC.

LIBERTY_GUY wrote:Thanks Butte. My current instant pay cart is a fixed width, which cannot be altered as that is fixed by the software (Coffeecup cart creator pro). My Zen powered shop prior to that had a fluid width template I could tweak through the template, but zen carts suffer from an overly long checkout process and a complex file structure.

I have great hopes for Opencart though..

OpenCart has a long checkout steps too, but there are extensions to shorten it to a one page checkout. Here's an example: http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route ... on_id=7382