[duhoang]

Thanks for everyone's thoughtful responses.

I'm researching Responsive Web Design as an option for a large e-commerce site. But for me, for a large site with a lot of dynamic content and functionality, it doesn't seem ideal to simply shrink it down to one column.

And I also wonder about the amount of time it takes to create designs taking all screen sizes into consideration.

Anyways, thanks again.

[danneu]

There are frameworks like Skeleton and Zurb's Foundation that handle the media queries and resizing/restyling for you, you just have to use their markup. And what they do out of the box is pretty much enough unless you want to hand-tweak a style down the road.

Also, responsive design doesn't have to be about getting your website to work on your 2001 Nokia brick's display. A good first step in responsive design is just to take advantage of the full width of the device your user is using up until a point. A lot of websites I view from my netbook could take advantage of just one media query: a full-sized design for large screens and then a fluid width design for anything smaller. I find a lot of websites give me a horizontal scrollbar on the 10' screen.

[rimantas]

You don't need to take "all" screen sizes into consideration. Just choose a few breaking points roughly equivalent to desktop, tablet and phone screens. This combined with fluid designs will let you to accommodate most of the variations quite well.

[stc]

You can do much more than just changing the column numbers or width, you can alter any styles.