12 Nov Responsive Web Design
With a wider variety of devices used to access the Internet than ever before, it has become even more important to ensure that as many of your website’s visitors as possible can enjoy an optimal viewing experience.
Responsive Web Design and Why It’s Important
Even if you are very new to Internet marketing and Web design, you have probably already heard the term “Responsive Web design.” With a wider variety of devices used to access the Internet than ever before, it has become even more important to ensure that as many of your website’s visitors as possible can enjoy an optimal viewing experience. This is exactly what responsive Web design is all about. Responsive Web design is a form of content adaptation in which a website automatically scales to the screen resolution and size of the device that it’s being displayed on. Responsive Web design is no longer a passing fad; it is becoming increasingly standard.
Long gone are the days when the vast majority of the world’s Internet users accessed the Web from a traditional desktop or laptop computer with a screen resolution of 1024×768. As of 2012, mobile Internet browsing accounts for more than twenty per cent of all Internet traffic in the United States alone and this statistic is only set to increase rapidly. That being said, there will always be people viewing websites on the big screen.
A More User-Friendly Browsing Experience
Although the 960 pixel grid system is still extremely popular, it is only optimal for screens with a resolution of 1024×768 or higher. Many of today’s computer screens display high definition resolutions such as 1980×1020, however. On a screen resolution such as this, a website designed using the 960 grid system will only occupy half of the horizontal space on the screen. On the other hand, such a website will still be too wide to fit comfortably on the screens of many mobile devices.
The whole point of responsive Web design is to minimize the amount of scrolling, panning and manual rescaling when using mobile browsers. This makes for a far more user-friendly experience on such devices.
You can see if a website is designed in this way by resizing the window that it is displayed in. The content should scale with the size of the window, minimizing the use of scrollbars. This is also useful for users of traditional computers, since it makes it easier to display multiple Web browser windows alongside each other.
How It Is Done
CSS3 media queries are used for making responsive designs and almost all modern Web browsers support this programming language. When building a custom website, you should configure your CSS3 media queries to target the most common range of resolutions. While it is ideal to accommodate absolutely any screen resolution or window size, this is really not necessary. Common widths that you should configure your media queries for are 320, 480, 600, 768, 960 and 1240 pixels.