What exactly is Responsive Design?
Responsive Design lets websites ‘adapt’ to different screen sizes without compromising usability and user experience. Text, UI elements, and images rescale and resize with respect to the viewport.
Responsive design allows developers to publish just one group of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code for multiple devices, platforms, and browsers. Responsive design is device-agnostic and aligns together with the popular development philosophy of Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY).
But there’s more for it . It can be challenging to make a preexisting site responsive, nevertheless the advantages of committing to responsive design early on inside a project far outweigh the trouble required to do it.
This post covers the evolution of responsive design, the essential components which make it work, as well as a guide to creating and testing responsive web applications.
The Evolution of Responsive Design
In the late 1990s, when browser wars were effectively reaching a (shortlived) end, most users had one browser (Internet Explorer) on a single main system (Ms windows). They had one device (desktop) with screen sizes that were about consistent everywhere. Designing websites because of these specifications didn’t involve abstracting differences between numerous browser engines, platforms, and devices-it might be completed with the different parts of static sizes.
Eventually, web designers began creating components whose dimensions were laid out in percentages in accordance with the viewport. This process allowed the components to the browser window. This philosophy had become known as ‘fluid design’.
Really, Ethan Marcotte published a piece of writing where he spoke of ‘Responsive Web Design’. The content discussed the variety of devices that readers utilized to connect to the web-which meant making up screen sizes, browsers, orientations, and modes of interaction while creating content for the kids. This informative article changed just how developers approached web design.
Right at the end of 2016, mobile browsing overtook web surfing. This emphasized the need for thinking mobile-first if this stumbled on web development.
Today, industry has over 9000 different mobile devices, making use of their own dimensions and graphics processing capabilities. Google prioritizes mobile-friendly websites in their listings. In 2019, you can not get the maximum online reach without having a responsive website.
Responsive Web Design: Setting the Scope
Before setting up a responsive website, check out your marketplace and audience. The goal is to discover:
The users connect to the web: Take a look at site’s traffic analytics and combine the insights with Test around the Right Devices report back to understand the top ten browsers/devices in your audience.
Do you know the website’s ‘core’ features: These must render uniformly across browsers/devices. Any devices might be increased in later iterations.
Responsive Website Testing
Once you have successfully developed a responsive website, you'll want to test to ensure it might:
Display and align this content consistently.
Render text legibly on all scales and viewports.
Keep content (text and images) within their containers.
Display and resize images as needed.
Allow users to scroll vertically (or horizontally, as in the situation of responsive data tables).
Let users navigate via links and menus on all devices.
Scale/resize content according to portrait or landscape orientations in mobile devices.
Within a responsive test, start with manually testing the website on various viewport sizes to find out if the content scales to match correctly. To discover inconsistencies in colors, fonts, illustrations, etc. you need to perform a mobile responsive test using real cellular phones.
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