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Planning a Responsive Website 449

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Testing Viewport

Planning a Responsive Website

Planning how you’re going to make your website responsive is an important first step
before you jump right in and start writing HTML and CSS. By planning what you need
to do you can avoid problems later.

Check Your Analytics

First you should check your website analytics. If your site is brand new, this will be dif-
ficult or impossible, but if it’s been live for even a few weeks you can get a sense of what
types of people are currently visiting your website.

Don’t assume that your site must be responsive. Sometimes just adding the viewport tag
listed previously is enough to support your mobile customers. But you won’t know how
many mobile customers you have until you look at your stats. You’ll learn more about
site analytics in Lesson 23, “How to Publish Your Site.”

Try the Site with Your Own Phone

If you have a low number of mobile viewers to your site, you might think that you don’t
need to make your site responsive. But if your site doesn’t work well on a mobile device,
then mobile customers won’t stick around and won’t come back. So the second step you
should do when planning is find a smartphone or other mobile device and go visit your
website. How does it look? Is it easy to use? Can you tap on the links and the navigation?
If you can, talk to some of your customers and get their thoughts on how your site works
on their mobile devices.

Decide What Content Is Critical

Once you know how important mobile users are to your site and how your site looks on
mobile devices, think about the content your site has. Is there content that is going to be