Responsive Web Design – The Basics
As today’s consumer is always on-the-go, a significant size of the world’s population uses mobile devices on the daily. This means that most website visits now happen with smartphones and tablets. According to M-commerce, the number of e-commerce sales and visits through mobile devices increases every year.
This is the reason why businesses with an online presence try to optimize their websites to make it user-friendly. It is now imperative that your website is accessible on various mobile devices or consumers will find another one that provides a better experience. And hence, a new web design that is responsive, and accommodates users on various devices, is the best option to go.
Responsive Web Design
Responsive web design is a web design approach to developing websites that appear optimally on various devices. The main idea behind responsive web design is to have one main website that responds and adjust to the device it’s viewed on. Compared to a fixed design, a responsive one is a front-end tool that optimizes the web design to the device whether it’s a smartphone, desktop or tablet.
For example, if you view a fixed website on a tablet, the layout will appear distorted with many elements of the page being hidden. On smaller screens like smartphones viewing such websites becomes even harder as large elements and heavy graphics take time to load and still appear broken.
But if your website uses a responsive web design, a cascading style sheet allows the website adjust to the dimensions of the browser. JavaScript and other libraries are used to navigate this function of the design to make the adjustments more dynamic. CSS queries are used to leverage your browser’s width, height and the orientation of the device to change the website layout accordingly.
Breakpoints
There are certain queries that create conditional boundaries or breakpoints at which the width of a mobile browser will trigger the alternate website layout. You can also alter the queries to detect height and device orientation along the height of the mobile browser.
The industry standard sizes vary from 320px to 1200px which align to various dimensions like mobile portrait, desktop, mobile landscape and tablet portrait and landscape. Some of these dimensions even merge together and match the same breakpoint, while there are some devices that require unique sizes.
Fluidity
Fluid scaling is the main tool that allows the web layout to be responsive between breakpoints and adjust the flow of the elements in a responsive grid. This scaling is most commonly achieved by developing percentages or “em” values to allow a container to adjust the elements.
For example, if you design a block within a website with the height set at ‘auto’, the block will scale according to the size of the browser. You can adjust this scaling to be on a more granular level, making sure that fluidity exists at the top level of any responsive container.
Both of these principles are used to design grid layouts that flow from left to right and top to bottom. It includes sidebars, main pages, banners, ads and other content across the website. To put emphasis on responsiveness, the designing focuses on retaining the elements to resize from desktop to mobile smoothly.
At Website Ultra, We’re trained in responsiveness development and will optimize your website to be user-friendly. We provide detailed development, regular checks and device testing to ensure your website adjusts seamlessly at any given time.
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