Anyone Still Selling or Using Wordpress Themes that aren't Responsive/Adaptive are in the Dark Ages!

How about pointing to a few sites where we can see and source these types of themes.

The skeleton theme is free as I recall, will have to find you the link, but I've been using WP-clear, which is a paid theme.

Both are good and you can do almost anything with them you can a "paid" non-responsive theme. Just need to know your way around WP...

Steve

Everyone to their own but for me responsive themes are far from being mobile friendly...

Whilst they may look great typically the end user experience is far from ideal... a true mobile site should be designed and optimized to be able to work on all devices that includes the content, navigation, and functionality... this means compatibility with both smartphones and feature phones... and there is no reason this cant be done with any of the popular CMS, its BS people saying that WP/Joomla, etc makes a mobile site too slow its not that its the developer... its down to the developer to understand what they are doing, if anything a WP site should be faster than a HTML only site if its caching properly and the theme or framework is developed properly for mobile, we have developed our own framework and it just that.

There are still a great deal of mobile devices that are used to access the web that cannot handle javascript properly typically older blackberries, a responsive design typically just shifts content around and resizes web objects and will not display properly on these types of devices due to mobile browser limitations - additionally mobile users certainly dont want to be downloading huge irrelevant images on a slideshow thats pointless or worse still hidden in the background when you have to take bandwidth in to consideration, fact certain browsers can only handle so much data per page...

Mobile users want content thats easily accessible on the go - typically web content for desktop is overkill for mobile users and certainly the same content is far from being optimized content for mobile...

Additionally a lot of clients simply dont want their website to be completely rebuilt or redesigned just so as it is responsive...

Google has spent 1000's of man hours and god knows how many dollars on mobile initiatives such as Gomo and developing particular tools specifically for mobile ie google maps, google smartphone and non smartphone search portals, speed testers specifically for mobile to name but a few so am thinking the future of mobile is important to Google, i know it is important to the US government if anyone read about the mobile initiative last week.and its certainly going to be important to facebook.

But back to google one of the main drawbacks to responsive designs that i see is that it does NOT indicate in anyway to Googles Mobile Bot that your site is actually mobile friendly... for me the reason for that its because in most cases its not!

Unlike code that properly validates for Mobile ie XHTML MP or has header changes based on the user agent, a mobile site map created for a responsive theme according to Google will not make your site to be considered mobile... in a time when search engine algorithms are constantly changing and where mobile is getting more and more popular for now we will be sticking to mobile optimized content and adaptive design.

If you are going an extra mile to go responsive on your own custom themes just do an optimized mobile site, delivering content thats optimized for the broadest range of mobile browsers will ultimately give you the best mobile end user experience and isnt it that thats what its all about?

For my company we are looking at the right now and that right now we feel that mobile users are not ready for responsive design but instead an adaptive approach should be used for mobile phone devices and responsive design used for tablet devices, we believe there will be a bridge and that responsive could be part of it only when HTML5 and CSS3 is fully supported, when the smartphone market has a more dominant share more than just the current estimated 50% and when bandwidth limits are a thing of the past, to go with responsive right now you are alienating a large portion of mobile visitors and we dont think thats a good strategy!

Good look with whatever you think is best for you and your clients

We have been supplying responsive WP themes on all new sites since April. We use it as a selling feature however, as Jay says, I don't call it a mobile website or even mobile ready.

It's just better than a non-responsive WP theme.

We use Genesis and ThemeForest as theme suppliers. Some ideas at ThemeForest below;

WordPress | ThemeForest

It will take a while for the majority of WordPress developers to update their themes to be adaptive/responsive.

In the meantime, if you have an established site or favourite theme, then the WP-Touch plugin does a great job at serving a mobile/tablet version of your site.