Summary

In this chapter we’ve started to work with the responsive design, by choosing and configuring a few responsive themes and testing them on our site.

We learned the difference between mobile and responsive themes, and the options available to us while choosing how to develop our mobile site. We also learned what to consider when choosing our approach and our theme, how to install and configure some free responsive themes, and how to combine an off-the-shelf responsive theme with a theme switcher to retain our existing desktop theme but improve the user experience on mobile devices.

But, this is just scratching the surface of what we can do with responsive themes. By building responsiveness into our own theme, we can retain all of the branding, design, and content we want for the Carborelli’s site, while ensuring that the site looks great on desktops, mobiles, and tablets. We can take it further by ensuring that mobile users don’t have to download large image files, and harness APIs and the functionality of the phone to create a responsive web application.

So let’s not hang around—in the next chapter we will get our hands dirty with code and start making our site properly responsive.