How to Design a Mobile Responsive Website. To build a mobile site or not to build a mobile site; this is a question at the forefront of many a discussion. There is, however, another option: responsive web design. When, why, and how should you go about designing a responsive website? With mobile internet users set to surpass desktop internet users in the US by 2015, with tablets becoming more popular, and even with TV internet usage increasing, it’s important for companies to provide a great user experience for all their visitors no matter what device they’re on.
How does responsive design help us do this? Well, by allowing us to create one website solution that is flexible for different screen widths. Why should you design a responsive site? There are many options to consider when a client asks for a mobile solution for their website, and the suitability of these options depend on the business requirements and budget; it’s also important to consider any existing solutions or sites they already have. You’re starting from scratch.
RWD - Presentation. Media Queries for Responsive Web Design. Responsive web design is one of the hottest topics among designers and developers right now. If you’re not quite sure what it’s all about, we’ll walk you through what it is, how it works and how CSS media queries are something you need to start incorporating into your own designs.
To top it all off, we’ll finish with twenty seriously impressive of responsive designs that use media queries to present experiences specifically catered to different visitors. What Are Media Queries? CSS3 has brought about a ton of fancy visual effects such as shadows and animations, but what about practical improvements? Is there anything about CSS3 that actually improves the way you can build websites from a usability standpoint? The answer is a resounding “yes” and is due largely to the inclusion of media queries. That’s a huge difference and there are plenty of stops along the way. Owltastic: An Excellent Example of Responsive Web Design Now, if I adjust that window size, a lot starts to happen.
How It Works. Designing for a Responsive Web. The web as we know it is changing. In the past, designers and developers only had to concern themselves with one medium: the computer screen. In recent years, however, a plethora of fully internet-enabled devices with scores of different shapes and capabilities have cropped up, meaning that we now have to design our websites to fit comfortably in as many screen sizes, shapes, and resolutions as you can possibly think of. Our old fixed-width layout approach is out of the question now. So what do we do? The answer, my dear reader, lies with Responsive Web Design. What is Responsive Web Design? The idea of Responsive Web Design, a term coined by Ethan Marcotte, is that our websites should adapt their layout and design to fit any device that chooses to display it.
In his book, the aptly titled "Responsive Web Design" he outlines the three parts to a responsive website: A fluid gridFluid imagesMedia queries If you only read one of those, make it the last one, written in May of last year. Content Choreography. The concept of permanently placing content on a web page for a single browsing width or resolution is becoming a thing of the past. Media-queried responsive & adaptive sites afford us the ability to re-architect content on a page to fit its container, but with this exciting new potential come equally exciting challenges. Web designers will have to look beyond the layout in front of them to envision how its elements will reflow & lockup at various widths while maintaining form & hierarchy.
Media queries can be used to do more than patch broken layouts: with proper planning, we can begin to choreograph content proportional to screen size, serving the best possible experience at any width. As I step into my 3rd responsive project with Paravel, I’ve made a habit out of picking apart media-queried sites I happen across, noting how things get rearranged at various widths. At times, it seems as though all of the site architecture & planning goes out the window as content reflows.
Responsive by default - Blog | Andy Hume. If you think about it, responsive layout is not a new thing. Open a simple HTML file in a web browser, and the content automatically adapts to fit the width of that browser. The web is responsive on its own—by default. It's us that's been breaking it all these years by placing content in fixed-width containers. Despite the fact that people have been arguing against this for years (please excuse the uncool URI). Mark Boulton describes current thinking on this as a shift, rather than a trend.
The web has a way of fixing its bad habits over time. What is responsiveness? Responsiveness is what a website does when it's loaded into an unknown browser on an unknown device by an unknown individual. Optimising for One Web, instead of specific browsers/devices/individuals, is an ideal that is a profound part of being a web developer. You'll note however, that I describe it as an ideal. To begin with there are a bunch of things we can't easily feature detect. 10 Excellent Tools for Responsive Web Design. By Jason Gross So, you’ve decided to venture into the creation of responsive web designs. Wonderful! With the browsing landscape diversifying into mobile devices, netbooks, desktops and so forth, responsive web designs allow web designers to provide different layouts for specific devices (based on screen size and browser features) giving site visitors an optimal user experience.
So now, you’ve determined that it would be beneficial to create responsive web designs. What tools can help you get the job done? Tools have started to spring up to provide us with shortcuts and helpers for common responsive web design tasks. I divided the tools in this list into four categories: Responsive typographyFlexible imagesResponsive web page layoutsTesting and cross-browser support Responsive Typography First, let’s look at two tools (out of the many out there) that allow us to create beautiful, adaptive typography. 1. 2.
Another jQuery plugin, FitText helps you make your headlines responsive. 3. imgSizer.js. RWD - Beginners Guide. Smashing - RWD - Code. Advertisement Almost every new client these days wants a mobile version of their website. It’s practically essential after all: one design for the BlackBerry, another for the iPhone, the iPad, netbook, Kindle — and all screen resolutions must be compatible, too. In the next five years, we’ll likely need to design for a number of additional inventions. When will the madness stop? It won’t, of course. In the field of Web design and development, we’re quickly getting to the point of being unable to keep up with the endless new resolutions and devices.
Responsive Web design is the approach that suggests that design and development should respond to the user’s behavior and environment based on screen size, platform and orientation. The Concept Of Responsive Web Design Ethan Marcotte1 wrote an introductory article about the approach, “Responsive Web Design992,” for A List Apart. Transplant this discipline onto Web design, and we have a similar yet whole new idea. Adjusting Screen Resolution. Smashing - RWD - Design. RWD Guide. If you’ve been working in the web design field for the past couple of years you should know that designing a fixed interface for a widescreen computer is not enough. Most of the clients you’ll be dealing with from now are going to request that their site is not only desktop-compliant but is also optimized for smartphones and tablets.
This issue presents the necessity of working with different screen resolutions in order to guarantee that a website looks good in all sorts of devices. But if the devices’ production continues at the same speed that it has for the past couple of years, the amount of screen resolutions and formats that designers will have to deal with is going to become unbearable. On this article we’ll be discussing one of the most effective solutions to face this problem with a certain easiness, we’re of course talking about responsive web design. So, what’s responsive web design? Flexible grid Screen resolution Aspects to consider Responsive Typography Flexible images JavaScript. Ethan Marcotte. Adactio - Jeremy Keith. A List Apart - RWD. The English architect Christopher Wren once quipped that his chosen field “aims for Eternity,” and there’s something appealing about that formula: Unlike the web, which often feels like aiming for next week, architecture is a discipline very much defined by its permanence.
Article Continues Below A building’s foundation defines its footprint, which defines its frame, which shapes the facade. Each phase of the architectural process is more immutable, more unchanging than the last. Creative decisions quite literally shape a physical space, defining the way in which people move through its confines for decades or even centuries. Working on the web, however, is a wholly different matter. But the landscape is shifting, perhaps more quickly than we might like. In recent years, I’ve been meeting with more companies that request “an iPhone website” as part of their project. A flexible foundation#section1 Let’s consider an example design. Becoming responsive#section2 responsive architecture .