Responsive web design is a recent term that has been used to describe the concept of changing a website’s layout in response to the size and resolution of the user’s screen. This has become important with the rise of smartphones and tablets because their screens are so different from traditional laptops and desktop computers. Ethan Marcotte coined the phrase responsive web design and wrote a book on the subject, appropriately titled Responsive Web Design.
Many users may have noticed that websites often have an alternative mobile site. In the past, this has been a separate design company, but today, with an even greater variety of devices, browsers, and screens, it has become increasingly inefficient to design separate websites and the usefulness of the designs has been recognized. flexible. The problem is that maintaining different sites for different devices is time consuming and expensive. Also, many times a site will detect the type of device being used to access it and will redirect you if it is a mobile device. With the large number of mobile devices being used to access sites, there is increased pressure on server resources.
The solution is to have a design that is flexible and responsive to the users themselves. One of the main methods of responsive web design is the media query, introduced in CSS3. A media query allows the site to essentially ask the device what its specifications are. There are two essential parts to the media query. The first is the media type, which in this case is what type of screen the device is using, and the second is the query itself, where the device inspects a certain feature of the device, such as its vertical or horizontal resolution. There have been previous JavaScript-based responsive designs, but media queries are more powerful because they can test for more than just screen resolution, and these separate properties can be tested in a single query. For example, even the bandwidth used by the consumer of the website can influence the design seen. Based on the response to the queries, the CSS will adapt the site’s markup to the device being used. Responsive web design also allows a web designer to modify where or if images will appear in a layout, all to suit the user.
Marcotte explains in his book that there are two other elements to responsive web design besides media queries and these are flexible/fluid grids and responsive images. Essentially, grids used to be made of a certain number of pixels with a certain number of columns. To make this fluid, one of the first ways to think about design is to think about proportions and make things scalable. There are already pre-made fluid grids that can be downloaded and used for new responsive websites. The next problem is converting still images into a fluid grid and this is addressed by using responsive images. The key is essentially to limit the size of the image to the container that is used on the website. These themes are simple in terms of ideas but complex in their execution. These concepts are integral to future web design because responsive behavior will become increasingly valuable to designers and consumers. Responsive web design will essentially allow a user using any device to have a more personalized and comfortable experience.