Web design is not easy, and responsive web design is even more difficult. Here are some common mistakes with responsive layouts:Forgetting to make your content responsiveSo you designed a very fancy responsive layout--perhaps with a library like Twitter Bootstrap--and are very happy with yourself. You apply your layout to your website and consider the job done.Meanwhile, your users see that your design is not responsive at all, because your content is not. There is not much use of having a responsive design if the images, embedded YouTube videos, and whatnot are as flexible as a brick.Bootstrap has the img-responsive class that can be attached to images to make them responsive. John Surdakowski has a tutorial explaining how to create a Responsive Youtube Embed. For other content elements, such as website badges, you may have to make custom adjustments.Forgetting to make your website accessible and backwards compatibleIf you are thinking about responsive web layouts, you are probably not behind the curve when it comes to web design. You probably run the latest web browser on your phone, tablet, and laptop.In your haste to cater to users on the latest iPhone or Nexus device, you may have forgotten about are users that old browsers (on the phone and desktop) and accessibility technologies (such as screen readers).Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox articles are a good starting point for accessibility and usability literature.Causing excessive scrolling on mobile devicesThe basics of responsive design is that horizontal grids can collapse into vertical lists. In some cases, this works great. In other cases, the horizontal grid makes for a very long vertical list.Twitter Bootstrap handles this well with their website navigation code. Long horizontal navigation bars do not compress into a vertical list, but rather into a JavaScript enabled button. Users click the button to get a dropdown menu of the navigation list. Users that are not navigating to another page do not have to scroll down to find the actual page content--the button is unobtrusive. You can see this design in action by looking at examples on the Bootstrap website, such as Fixed Top Navbar Example.Bootstrap will handle that for you in regards to your navigation code, but make sure to come up with intelligent solutions to avoid excessive scrolling in other parts of the website's design.Including user interface elements that do not work well on mobileA gigantic registration form is difficult to fill out on a mobile device. Turning the registration form into a responsive layout makes it marginally easier, but one has to wonder whether it is still a reasonable expectation for the user to fill out all of the information that you ask.The tech jobs website Whitetruffle ( https://www.whitetruffle.com/ ) does a good job of handling this with their registration form. When one registers on the website from a mobile device, the website is intelligent enough to skip a few steps in filling out the profile, letting the user complete those steps on a desktop or laptop computer.Ultimately, responsive design is something that has to be done.u00a0 Lyza Danger Gardner explains ( http://alistapart.com/column/do-... )u00a0 how responsive design is important for building web designs that progressively enhance depending on the client's capabilities.But as with everything, there is a right way and a wrong way to do responsive design.