Making a layout ‘responsive’ can be very easy. It might be as simple as setting a % width rather than a fixed one. Usually it’s more involved than that, of course, but it doesn’t have to be too complex. Adding in @media queries is easy. The best thing to do would be to read some articles on this or a book or two.
In April 2012, 35% of my visitors were on mobile devices. I haven’t checked recently, but I will bet that number is a few percentage points higher now.
My traffic hasn’t grown and, in fact, my traffic is still much lower than it used to be before Google killed it. It’s just that people are switching to mobile devices more and more. If 35% of my visitors were using mobile devices because I was getting more visitors (people away from the desktop), that would be good. But that’s not the case. This shift to mobile is just another thing to worry about as far as making a site user-friendly.
This is a strange problem indeed. The web developers of course are not happy to do variations of the same site… one for web, one for mobile, etc… On the other hand, teh more time goes the more adavanced the mobile devises become, so very soon their monitors will have high enough resolution to display nearly any site properly. Yes, I have done reduced mobile versions for some of my sites, such as <snip>. ANd some of my BIGcommerce stores also have mobile versions provided by the server.
100% for all sizes, all resolutions with all zoomsettings on mine; kind of hard to beat that one.
Fluid design is the way to go unless you are happy to setup different sites for different formats, which I suppose is even better.