Are you a web design company? Does your company aims to build websites that provides optimum user-friendly experience? Are you a web designer yourself? If yes, I am sure this article might serve you with some more insights on Responsive Web Design. This term might not be new but however this article will give you added information on Responsive Design so that you can build extremely flexible websites that will adapt to any web environment.
So What actually Responsive Web Design is and Why is it important?
Responsive Web Design is the term coined by Ethan Marcotte in his article in A List Apart. With the advancement of technology and emergence of various web-based devices, it became imperative to build websites that can yield same quality in all devices and browsers. Today, from desktops to laptops to smartphones, people use various devices to use internet. In such situation, the old trend of building websites that is compatible to only one device or browser is of no use today. And because there are so many new devices emerging,it is impossible and impractical to build websites for each device. Hence, Responsive Web Design has emerged as the latest web design trend that allows users across a broad range of devices and browsers to have access to a single source of content, laid out so as to be easy to read and navigate with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling. Responsive Web Design describes a website-building process that utilizes the same set of code to display properly on desktop, tablet and smartphone browsers.
netmagazine.com has ranked Responsive Web Design as #2 on its list of Top Web Design Trends for 2012 following Progressive Enhancement which was ranked #1. Responsive web design simplifies the task making the websites more flexible,accessible and user-friendly.
Elements of Responsive Web Design
As introduced/coined by Ethan Marcotte in both his article “Responsive Web Design” as well as his best-selling book, one needs three elements to make a site responsive:
- A flexible/fluid grid
- Responsive images
- Media queries
What are these terms then?
Let us have a brief overview on this:
Adjustable layouts – What makes a responsive web design worthy of all the attention is the enhanced flexibility of the layouts and design in order to make it usable on different screen resolutions. The fluidity of the web design improves the navigation placement on the site in accordance with the screen size. Moreover, the columns in a responsive web design also scales as per the screen size or the browser size. The Tiny Fluid Grid is a handy tool that facilitates your web design as it allows you to make grids up to 1200 px maximum width.
Responsive images – Use of images can be a problem when viewing in a device with smaller screen size. To overcome this problem, responsive web design comes to the aid of the designers. It allows them to have adjustable images that fit different screen sizes and devices. Some of the tools that can help them in resizing the images include fly Dynamically,
Media queries – Since the evolution of CSS3, media queries has become a significant element of the responsive web design. This is a handy element that allows web designers to create multiple layouts using the same content.
Examples of Responsive Website Designs
The examples below will illustrate more about the concept of the Responsive Web Design:
- Think Vitamin
- CreativeDepart
- Hicks Design
- CSS-Tricks