Responsive Web Design for Mobile and Tablet

Responsive DWeb esign

Responsive Web Design is designed to deliver a compelling customer experiences across multiple devices.

Responsive web design is the building of a website that is suitable to work on every device and every screen size, no matter how large or small, mobile or desktop. Responsive web design is focused around providing an intuitive and gratifying experience for everyone. Desktop computer, laptop, tablet and smart phone users alike all benefit from responsive websites.

Why is Responsive Web Design So Important?

“With Responsive Web Design, you can create one well-planned site to deliver an optimized experience in context to each device or screen size.”
Why is responsive web design so important?

Responsive Web design is the practice of building websites that display based on screen size, platform and orientation. This consists of a mix of flexible grids and layouts, images and an intelligent use of CSS media queries.

As the user switches from their laptop to iPad, the website should automatically switch to accommodate for resolution, image size and scripting abilities. In other words, the website should have the technology to automatically respond to the user’s preferences. This eliminates the need for a different design and development phase for each new gadget on the market.

With Web users increasingly using mobile devices to browse Web sites and apps, Web designers and developers need to be sure that their creations look as good and work as well on mobile devices as on traditional desktop computers. Whether you design for mobile devices as a primary target or as a nice extra, you can use the power of CSS to ensure that the same content can be accessed across all hardware platforms, from mobile phones to wide-screen high-resolution displays.

Some Responsive Web Design strategies include:

  • Liquid or fluid layout: Defining all container widths in terms of percentages of the browser viewport, so that they expand and contract as the browser window changes size.
  • Media queries: Invoking different style sheets based on the capabilities of the display being used, such as size, resolution, aspect ratio, and color depth.
  • Fluid images: Setting images to occupy at most the maximum display width.

Responsive Web Design Resources

The term responsive web design itself was coined and largely developed by Ethan Marcotte. Ethan’s book Responsive Web Design is a great place to get started learning about responsive web design and is a highly recommended read. Below are more responsive web design resources:

Overviews

Techniques

Tools

Examples