What is Responsive Web Design?

Mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets adoption is rapidly increasing. This means user behavior has changed largely and a website needs to adapt to this changes in order to create good user experience by applying mobile-friendly layout.

A couple of years ago, the buzz of mobile version website design had come to rise. It’s the beginning of adaptable web design trying to set the layout in-sync with every screen, including desktop, netbook, handphone, smartphone, blackberry and any other devices in the market.

Though a mobile version website could solve the problem, in the long run, it is not effective. The reason is, it requires a bunch of development jobs to follow various screen resolution in the market.

For many websites, creating a mobile version for each device resolution would be impossible since there are unlimited mobile products coming out very fast.

On the client side, that means far more cash needs to be budgeted to follow the updated screen size.

Responsive web design is the solution to this problem.

Responsive web design is different from mobile version website. The responsive website is designed to respond to user behavior and environment of various device platforms, including screen resolutions and orientation (portrait or landscape). This technique eliminates the purpose to do a different design for each device in the market.

When a user visits a website in desktop or laptop, it follows the screen resolution. When he switches to their iPhone, iPad or Android devices, the web layout instantly adapt to the available screens.

Contents, graphics, photos and all elements in the website are being adjusted to the screen as well, providing more comfortable access to information.

How Does Responsive Web Design Works?

Responsive web design uses fluid layout or specifically fluid grid. For instance, if we have 2 columns in the page layout and we want them to be equal in width, we need to set them to be 50% each.

It requires flexible HTML/XHTML, adaptable image dimensions and smart use of CSS queries.

Media files such as photos and videos need to be resized automatically to follow the screen too. The intelligent use of CSS in supporting responsive layout is really essential.

Why Do Business Requires Responsive Web Design?

Because everybody is doing it? Absolutely not. It simply because business needs to provide concise information and make them easily accessible to the market.

Have you had your website responsive? If not yet, it is time to stay in pace with the trend. Comment below if you need more information about responsive web design.