Google Sites and Responsive Web Design (RWD)

Post date: Mar 26, 2014 5:13:59 PM

We have come across these questions quite frequently:

  1. Is Google Sites Responsive?

  2. Is Google Sites Mobile-Friendly?

  3. Will Google Sites look good on my smartphone and tablet?

These questions are all actually slightly different and warrant different answers. Let's take them one-by-one.

Is Google Sites Responsive?This depends on your definition of Responsive Web Design. If you are looking for breakpoints and alternate page layouts when resizing the browsing window to smartphone or tablet sizes, then no, Google Sites is not responsive. However, if you define responsive as scaling the website to the device browser size, then yes, Google Sites is responsive.

Here is Wikipedia's definition:

Responsive Web Design (RWD) is a Web design approach aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices (from mobile phones to desktop computer monitors).

There is a lot that can be done in Google Sites to reduce resizing, panning and scrolling.

Is Google Sites Mobile-Friendly?

Yes. There are two options for mobile viewing with Google Sites: standard and enable optimized mobile viewing. Both are available in Google Sites. We work on all our websites, testing them thoroughly on iPhone, iPad, Android smartphone to verify that mobile browsing is easy. No one likes to pinch and scroll, so we design with that goal in mind.

Will Google Sites look good on my smartphone and tablet?

Yes. Text should be legible, images crisp, navigation easy and everything functioning. We don't dumb down our designs for some sort of mobile version of your website. We make the full website experience better.

Check out our latest Google Sites Responsive Web Design Experiment