Responsive Website - advice please - what variant sizes do you go for?

[Room101]

I'm curious and also looking for advice from experience here ...

I have built a responsive website. I have produced it for large screen + tablet + mobile.

Given that the large screen templates provided by Xara are designed for the 'not full width' layout, and that only a few of their templates are actually for three size variants and not two, I was wondering what your recommendation is to how many variants are practical?

Is three necessary, or just over the top / more to manage and slower to build?

What mileage (re customer, end user, google?) is there really in delivering three variants to the customer rather than two (a full screen and a mobile I guess).

many thanks in advance.

[Acorn]

I would probably go for three if I knew the demographic and two for a general website.

Assume each Variant you add doubles your design and test effort, especially if you are adding code.
In maths, this is big-O country, where your effort is E = O(n²). A total of four Variants would be 16-times more intense that in just having a main site.

For some It might be O(n^1.5), so the effort for four Variants is only 8 that of a single.

Acorn

[Boy]

[Acorn]

Glad you appreciate,
Acorn

[Boy]

... and dazzled!

[gwpriester]

480 pixels, the default new variant size, works well for smart phones and up to 720px (or some such number) which displays well in smaller tablets portrait mode. With tablets you can rotate the screen to landscape mode and see the main variant, or rotate to portrait and see the mobile (480px version)