Make Your Website Design More ‘Responsive’

Web design is a dynamic field and it adapts new technologies very quickly. Now, with the easy availability of smartphones and tablets, the way we view websites has been completely overhauled. The issue now is, fitting the same websites into all of these devices with various screen sizes.

It is for this exact purpose that “Responsive Design” has evolved. The responsive design allows users to view websites on mobile devices. It also made the web design more user-friendly to suit small screen space and multiple OS. Therefore, it becomes unnecessary for a website design service to build separate websites for desktops and phones, or even separate sites for different iOS and Android.

Responsive web design, what is the big deal?

Responsive web design suggests that design and development should act in response to the user’s actions and environment based on screen size, platform and orientation of the mobile device.

Responsive web design has a combination of flexible grids and layouts, images and a clever use of CSS media queries. This trend has three main designing goals – the website should be flexible with resolution, image size and scripting abilities. In other words, the website should be accessible to all.

How To Implement a Responsive Website Design

Here is a list of the things you should pay attention to while implementing responsive design.

• Accommodate the user’s device– A responsive website should accommodate iPhone, iPad, and any other portable devices. To make the site flexible, you should use a flexible grid foundation. While designing the site and images that are incorporated into the design should be flexible as well. Use media queries to enable the website for landscape and portrait view.

• Flexible grids– To suit a variety of mobile browsers, you should define your own parameters for columns, spacing and containers in the web design. Give special attention to size and spacing to create a flexible grid system. For web page measurement purposes, use ems and percentages instead of pixels.

• Customize images– A major feature of flexible web design is that images move and scale with the flexible grid. For a fast loading time, use small size images. Don’t use the width and height attributes to scale them; it may hamper the usability factor.

Instead of scaling, you can crop the images using the CSS overflow property. It crops images automatically as the containers around them shift to accommodate new display orientation. You can have multiple sizes of the same image and offer them according to the user’s screen space and orientation. If it’s needed, then you can completely hide the images as well, using the media queries.

• Importance of media queries– Media queries permit designers to create multiple layouts using the same HTML document. It allows the web designer to accommodate different browser window sizes. Media queries also handle the screen orientation, screen resolution and color related issues. It’s extremely important in responsive web design as you can build websites that fit different devices.

Conclusion

In conclusion, responsive web design is a great trend for mobile websites. Implementing a responsive website design will save you money from having to build extra sites, and allows you to tap into the full smart device market. With the enormous amount of daily internet that arises from smartphones, this should drive plenty of traffic into your website.