The technology is rapidly expanding day by day and with this, there is an expansion of many devices with many different functionalities and different screen sizes. Long gone are the days for the website designers, where they could just write a single piece of website design and forget about everything else, even if it is required. Responsive web designs are the perfect solutions to our multi-screen problems, but getting into it from the print perspective is very difficult. To design in respect to pixels for desktop and mobile is also the past, as more and more gadgets can open up the website. The responsive web design is the approach where a designer creates a web page that responds to or resizes itself depending on the type of device it is being seen through. The responsive designs have become an important tool for anyone with the digital presence. With an increase in smartphone, tablets and other mobile computing devices, more and more people are using smaller screens to view web pages.
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Responsive website
The main and core purpose of responsive web design is to have one site but with the help of different elements which responds differently when viewed on the devices having completely different sizes. In the field of web design and development, we are quickly getting to the point of being unable to keep up with the endless new resolutions and the devices. For many of the websites, to create a website version for each of the resolution and new devices can be quite impossible of losing visitors from one device for the benefit of gaining visitors from another. The web design is the approach which suggests that thewebsite development system and design system must respond to the user's behavior and environment based on the screen size, platform, and orientation. According to the reports, 22% of the users turned to their phone first for browsing the internet and looks at the website on it. With the help of responsive web design, all the content and pages are flexible across all screen resolution and devices.
So today, we are going to look at the 3 basic fundamental techniques which you need to master, by which you can be an effective responsive designer:
Media Queries
- The responsive web design is the approach where a designer creates a web page that responds to or resizes itself depending on the type of device it is being seen through. The responsive designs have become an important tool for anyone with the digital presence.
- Responsive Web Design Fundamentals This course is an introduction to responsive web design strategies and how to implement those strategies through HTML, CSS and JavaScript. You'll learn how responsive thinking affects content writing and structure as well as your design and development workflow.
Nov 16, 2018 The responsive web design is the approach where a designer creates a web page that responds to or resizes itself depending on the type of device it is being seen through. The responsive designs have become an important tool for anyone with the digital presence. The browser is an endless, flexible canvas. It's a natural place to code, and its dynamic design surface and instant feedback allows for more responsive web designs. In this course, Morten Rand-Hendriksen explains his approach to designing in the browser, which starts well before he even starts coding. Pete LePage - Pete is a developer advocate at Google and works to make the lives of web developers easier. Working on projects like Web Fundamentals and Google web developer videos, he's focused on ensuring that developers have the tools and skills they need to build great responsive sites and apps with awesome user experiences.
The media queries let you design the website in different layouts for each different media types like a screen print, TV, handheld devices, etc. Depending upon the media types, you can configure the style, font and another required element of the page. The range of media type includes handheld, screen, TV, print, and projection. They generally consist of a media type declaration and one or more media feature expression which evaluates to a true or false statement.
Fluid Grids
The fluid grid is the term which is used for describing the layout that is cooled in the relative proportion of the various elements rather than with fixed pixel values. The traditional CSS layouts are used with fixed grids to position the elements. The fixed grid approach no longer works today, because now we have the device screens which range from 3 inches to a few feet.
Flexible Image
The images are deemed flexible when the image renders in the native size as long as the HTML container supports it, but when the browser window shrinks, then the image scales to fit into it. If the browser window or screen becomes the smaller, this piece of CSS code will shrink the image proportionately and the height of the image is adjusted automatically while keeping the aspect ratio locked.
Why Do Businesses need to switch to Responsive Web Design?
The no. of people using mobile devices is increasing daily and so is the scope of businesses to reach towards customer especially through their sites is increasing. A recent study of Pew researchhas demonstrated that 77% of the Americans now own the smartphones in the year 2018 which is increasing 35% from 2011. In order to capitalize on the optimum usage of infographics and other features, the organization firms are increasingly incorporating the responsiveness nowadays. You might be unsure as to whether or not the businesses website must be implemented as responsive design, especially if you do not understand the concept. The responsive design can help you to solve lots of issues for your website. It will make your website mobile friendly and thus improves the way in which it looks on the devices with both large and small screens and thus increases the amount of time which visitors spend on your site.
Need of Responsive Website for Business
The responsive design also helps to improve your ranking on search engine. Mxgp3 – the official motocross video game 1 0 3. Additionally, according to the reports, Google announced that mobile friendliness would become a ranking factor in its search engine algorithms. With the mobile development services and technology operating on a continual cycle of development and mobile usage still regularly growing and there really isn't a question anymore. The top website development companies all around the globe, like Tekshapers one of the pioneer and well-recognized website development service provider takes care of the client's business website as their own and makes it user-friendly and easy for deployment. This will help to reduce the amount of the clients business which can be found through browsing but also can make it more difficult for existing customers when they require connecting with you through their mobile platform.
Benefits of Responsive Web Design
The responsive web design benefits designers, developers, and business and most importantly to the users in the following number of ways:
More Mobile traffic
According to the report from the similar web, about more than half of the traffic to top websites in the U.S. comes from mobile devices, in the year 2015. Therefore, it is increasingly crucial for the organization to have a website which renders properly on a smaller screen so that the users cannot encounter the distorted images or experience a sub-optimal site layout.
Faster Mobile development
Making one the responsive website takes considerably less time than making a stand-alone mobile application in addition to the standard desktop website. Since we know, time is money; therefore, the response design naturally comes as lesser cost alternative.
Lower Maintenance
Maintaining a separate mobile site requires additional testing and support. In contrast, the process of responsive design uses the standardized testing methodologies for ensuring the optimal layout on every screen. By having separate desktop and mobile sites also need two content strategies, two administrative interface and potentially two design teams.
Faster Web pages
The mobile users, in particular, have short attention spans. According to the studies the mobile visitors tend to abandon the webpage which take longer time than three seconds to finish the loading. By ensuring that your web design uses modern performance techniques will help to improve your webpage loading speed.
Lower Bounce rate
A responsive and optimized mobile site provides the much better user experience for the visitor. Therefore, it is much more likely that they will stick around for a longer period of time and thus can explore the different areas of your site. Alternatively, if your site is not responsive then it is harder to keep the visitors engaged to your site.
Conclusion
The responsive design is the future of our industry, but because of so many different techniques flying around, it is often hard to keep up. This is the mere concept which when implemented correctly can help to improve the user experience, but not completely solve it for every user. To continually improve the user experience as technology evolves in coming years, we need to constantly work on with new devices.
A few years ago, it was relatively easy to design and build websites. Websites were simpler, and were viewed on desktops and laptops with little variation in screen sizes. Today with mobile devices taking over viewers' browsing time, a website can be viewed on a 4.8' smartphone screen, a 5' phablet, a 7' tablet or any size in between.
So how do you ensure your website displays correctly across device types and screen sizes?
The solution was first proposed by Ethan Marcotte, when he explored ways to make website designs responsive, i.e. have them change according to the screen size. A responsive website design is one which makes clever use of CSS to ensure that web pages render well across a wide range of screen sizes – without resorting to URL redirection or dynamically serving different HTML and CSS code, depending on the UserAgent. It's not really a technology or a standard, but rather a set of design principles that help achieve the result.
Over the last few years, many responsive templates, CSS frameworks and WordPress themes have sprung up. It is, for example, possible to create a responsive website in WordPress without writing a single line of code.
But a real web designer isn't satisfied with just using the templates. She'll make the effort to understand the elements of responsive web design, in order to use them effectively.
So today, we're going to look at the 3 fundamental techniques you need to master, you be an effective responsive designer.
1. Media queries
Media queries let you design different layouts for different media types like screen, print, TV, handheld devices etc. Depending on the media type, you can configure the style, the font and other elements of the page.
Introduced in CSS3, media queries let a designer customize the presentation of the content to suit a specific range of output device types. They consist of a media type declaration and one or more media feature expressions that evaluate to true or false.
The range of media types include handheld, screen, tv, print and projection. Media features include, but are not limited to device height, width, aspect ratio, resolution, color index as well as height, width of the browser window.
Let's take a basic example; imagine you want your text size to shrink on smaller devices, like phones. The query for that would look something like:
Now, the font size of your paragraphs will be set to 1em, unless the browser width is less than 400px, in which case it will shrink to 0.8em.
In my experience, the best way to design a responsive layout is to first create a default master style sheet with the main structural elements. Then you can add in media queries to customize elements based on the layout or other device elements. If it's more than a handful of rules, it might be better to move them out to a separate child sheet — which you can selectively load later. Here's how that would work:
This piece of code checks whether the device is a handheld in landscape mode with device width less than 720px, and if so, it loads the tablet_layout.css stylesheet.
Note that the features width, height, min/max-width, min/max-height all refer to the browser window's width and height. The device width and height are controlled by the device-width, device-height, min/max- device-width, min/max- device-height. If you'd like to look up more examples using media queries MDN has a good round up.
2. Fluid grids
'Fluid grid' is a term used to describe a layout that is coded in relative proportions of the various elements, rather than with fixed pixel values.
Traditional CSS layouts used fixed width grids to position the elements. The fixed-width approach no longer works today now that we have device screens ranging from 3 inches to a few feet. In a fluid grid design, everything is coded in terms of its relative proportion to the base element i.e. instead of specifying the height and width of each element; it is given a percentage or relative size.
Imagine you have four columns. To make this fluid, instead of specifying each as 200 pixel wide, you'd have to specify them 0.2083 % (ie as 200/960). At least, that's the principle. Creating an entirely fluid grid requires much care. It's one of those rare cases I'd rather recommend using custom tools. Tiny Fluid Grid, Variable Grid System and Fluid Baseline Grid are some great alternatives to writing your own fluid grid from scratch.
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3. Flexible images
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Images are deemed flexible when the image renders in native size, as long as the HTML container supports it, but when the browser window shrinks, the image scales to fit it.
Even if the rest of the design is fluid and responsive, it's not going to render well, if all components don't scale. This can get tricky with images and videos. A 700 pixel wide image will look great on a desktop, but get chopped off when viewed on a 320 pixel tablet. Most modern responsive designs use the CSS max-width property to make images scale. (This method was first proposed by Richard Butler.)
These few lines will ensure that the image doesn't get chopped off, by setting the max image width to 100% of the container. If the browser window or screen becomes smaller, this piece of CSS code will shrink the image proportionately. The height is automatically adjusted, while keeping the aspect ratio locked.
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Enpass password manager 5 6 3. You can instead, lock the image to occupy a certain vertical screen proportion like this
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(Make sure not to use both max-height and max-width properties together. )
The image size can also be linked to the text size instead of the parent element using em, like this:
If the image contains text, you may want to limit the minimum/maximum size, to ensure that the text is readable. You can specify it like this:
The same techniques can be used to scale videos, for example:
Final thoughts
Responsive design is the future of our industry, but with so many different techniques flying around, it's often hard to keep up. Master these 3 simple techniques, and you'll be 90% of the way to being a responsive designer.
Featured image/thumbnail, elastic image via Shutterstock.
