What Is Responsive Web Design? And How It Works

Creating a non-resizable web page by setting a fixed width doesn’t work either; that leads to scroll bars on narrow devices and too much empty space on wide screens. Although testing the application on a variety of devices is important, depending on the application in question, it could be unnecessarily exhaustive to test it on 3000+ device/browser combinations. Developers can make Mobile responsiveness testing more efficient by testing on the right devices. Mobile users are impatient and are quick to switch from website to website in search of entertainment. Therefore when trying to create a responsive web application, the developers should attempt to make the website light so that it loads quickly and smoothly. First impressions are important, and a fast-loading website will lend to making the user a more favorable view of the application.

Your site should be prepared to adjust to many screen sizes and dimensions — desktop, laptop, tablet, mobile (so many different sizes of mobile). It can be best to consider this a fluid spectrum rather than separate categories, as devices come in a wide range of sizes and proportions now. In addition, when viewing on mobile, users may move between landscape and portrait, which you will want to adjust to as well. At the time, the recommendation was to use CSS float for layout and media queries to query the browser width, creating layouts for different breakpoints. Fluid images are set to not exceed the width of their container; they have their max-width property set to 100%.

Show Different Images Depending on Browser Width

This leads to a very annoying user experience since the text is often extremely small and out of place, leading the user to have to zoom in and out in order to make sense of the website’s contents. It’s important to enlarge the text where needed and format the content so that it’s aesthetically pleasing while still fitting the smaller screen size. Other than the varying screen size of the tablet and mobile devices, there is also a multitude of device configurations with different browsers and OS.

Screen readers have trouble with some non-fluid elements, such as fixed tables. They also can’t read text within images, so it will help to ensure all text is in paragraphs or has alt text. Adding alt text to images allows those with limited vision to understand your site’s visual elements, and it will have the added benefit of being searchable for search engine optimization (SEO).

Four Essential Features a Mobile Responsive Website should have

This inclusivity also covers the few users with the advanced smartphones now and in the future. Moreover, responsive web design can lead to better search engine optimization (SEO) for your website. Search engines, including Google, prioritize websites that provide a smooth and efficient user experience. By meeting these criteria, a website becomes more appealing to users and stands a better chance of ranking higher in search results. This approach is particularly beneficial given the growing use of smartphones for online activities. As per Zippia’s data, 82% of shoppers in the US use their smartphones for purchases, especially for buying entertainment and food items, and prefer the convenience of mobile browsing.

The meta viewport tag instructs the browser how to adjust the page to the width of each device. Learn an intuitive way to test Android apps directly in web browsers using BrowserStack’s real devic… Did you know a mobile-friendly website helps in boosting SEO rankings? Today, everyone has smartphones with them, constantly communicating and looking for information.

Discover the difference between adaptive versus responsive sites

Users could zoom in and pan around the website to view the bits they were interested in, but it looked bad. While the default responsive behavior may sound like no solution is needed, long lines of text displayed full screen on a wide monitor can be difficult to read. During the development of a website, it would be prudent to check whether the website is behaving as predicted across different devices. To test mobile responsiveness across different device/browser combinations, tools such as Browserstack’s Responsive Tool can be highly useful. When creating a mobile responsive website, the general layout of the website and its content both need to be transformed in order to reproduce the desktop experience on a smaller screen. Ensure your website has a responsive web design, i.e., your content adapts to different devices automatically, and you’re ready.

But you’re bound to face some challenges while making your website responsive. Wireframing can help to iron out the creases early in the design process, and this works well when taking a mobile-first website design basics approach to responsive web design. Perhaps there’s a responsive breakpoint that needs some extra attention, or maybe there’s a concept that just isn’t effective in terms of mobile responsiveness.

Responsive design with no-code tools

A fluid grid or fluid layout is code that uses measurements that are flexible for Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) — the language used to define the layout and structure of web pages. Discover what is responsive web design from simple definitions to foundations, benefits, examples & best practices. There’s more we can do to make video and images look the best on phones and tablets.

• In order to create a mobile-responsive website, there needs to be a plan in place from the get-go.
• The overall layout of your site is the key to maintaining the look and legibility of the majority of your site between devices.
• Your responsive web design company might perform research on your target audience to ensure your web design approach fits with your user behavior.
• Notice that in the example above, the image can be scaled up to be larger than its original size.
• To avoid refreshing your site with every technological update or invention, build in flexibility and fluidity from the beginning.

So slapping your content into a single column and calling it quits isn’t going to cut it. Website elements such as images and text are optimized and scaled down without compromising quality. In addition to keeping your site visually consistent across different devices, a fluid grid controls page alignment to ensure your website looks accurate on any device. If you’d like to stay-in-the-know about responsive website design, sign up for our exclusive newsletter, Revenue Weekly, to get web design and marketing tips for your business. Now that we have a few RWD layout techniques up our sleeve, let’s take a look at elements that pose challenges specific to their visual nature — images and video.

Responsive Design: Definition, Examples, Principles, and Best Practices

One key strategy to establish responsive images, video, iframes and other elements involves the use of aspect-ratio. The aspect ratio box is not a new technique and quite a useful tool to have up your sleeve as a web developer. But in responsive web design the server always sends the same HTML code to all devices, and CSS is used to alter the rendering of the page on the device.

These work on static websites, but responsive websites need a responsive font. This is necessary to make typography adjust to screen size and be easily readable on multiple devices. In this example, we want to set our level 1 heading to be 4rem, meaning it will be four times our base font size.

A Beginner’s Guide to Mobile Responsive Design

This means that a 16px font size, for instance, would look bigger or smaller on some devices depending on its resolution. Web developers will typically use em units to define font sizes, which are a type of responsive unit where 1em is equal to 1 point. According to Statista, mobile traffic was responsible for 52.64% of all global traffic in 2017, meaning that a website not well optimized for mobile devices is losing out on approximately half of its traffic. By the end of 2018, it’s expected that the global traffic share for mobile devices will grow to 79%, which is an exceptional increase. Nearly 80% of people in the US spend at least 3 hours on their phones daily. Perhaps, that’s because mobile devices are readily accessible on-the-go and are more conducive to casual browsing.

By kibriDagan in IT Education on 04.10.2023