Do you start a responsive design mobile or desktop first?

How do you typically start when building web pages?

  • Mobile first
  • Desktop first
  • It depends on the project

0 voters

I was looking at responsive web design projects and noticed that quite a few of them had issues when viewed on a smaller screen. I realized that I’ve been building desktop first and then I try to make it work on smaller screens. Maybe this is because I’m working on a bigger screen and my browser has been defaulting to a desktop view. I’m going to try starting small then going big (it should be easy enough for me to use the toggle device toolbar in Chrome DevTools).

I’m not so much trying to determine or debate a best practice but curious just how many more here default to desktop first. Maybe I’ll find out that my assumption is wrong and more of us designing mobile first.

I found this link, http://bradfrost.com/blog/post/mobile-first-responsive-web-design/, posted by @camper in this post Johnny Cash - Tribute Page.

It doesn’t really work going any way except mobile-first if you’re building a responsive site. And if you build a site that works on mobile, it will work on desktop. The opposite isn’t true (a good example is Wikipedia [although it’s an old, pre-universal-smartphone site] - the mobile site looks really nice on desktop - better than the desktop site - and the desktop site doesn’t work on mobile)

Most traffic for most sites comes via mobile, there isn’t really an excuse for a site not working on mobile in this day and age