What’s Responsive Design?

Responsive Design lets websites ‘adapt’ to be able to screen sizes without compromising usability and consumer experience. Text, UI elements, and images rescale and resize with regards to the viewport.

Responsive design allows developers to write a single pair of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code for multiple devices, platforms, and browsers. Responsive design is device-agnostic and aligns with the popular development philosophy of Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY).

But there’s more to it than that. It could be challenging to make a pre-existing site responsive, but the great things about investing in responsive design ahead of time within a project far outweigh the time and effort necessary to achieve it.

This article covers the evolution of responsive design, the fundamental components making it work, plus a help guide creating and testing responsive web applications.

The Evolution of Responsive Design

Within the late 1990s, when browser wars were effectively reaching a (shortlived) end, most users had one browser (Internet Explorer) on one operating system (Ms windows). That they had one device (desktop) with screen sizes that have been more or less consistent everywhere. Designing websites because of these specifications didn’t involve abstracting differences between numerous browser engines, platforms, and devices-it may be done with the different parts of static sizes.

Eventually, web designers began creating components whose dimensions were laid out in percentages when compared with the viewport. This strategy allowed the components for the browser window. This philosophy came into existence called ‘fluid design’.

Really, Ethan Marcotte published a piece of writing where he spoke of ‘Responsive Web Design’. This article discussed the range of devices that readers accustomed to get the web-which meant accounting for screen sizes, browsers, orientations, and modes of interaction while creating content for the kids. This post changed just how developers approached web design.

Right at the end of 2016, mobile browsing overtook web browsing. This further emphasized the significance of thinking mobile-first when it found web development.

Today, the marketplace has over 9000 different mobile phones, with their own dimensions and graphics processing capabilities. Google prioritizes mobile-friendly websites in its search engine results. In 2019, you cannot increase your online reach with no responsive website.

Responsive Web site design: Setting the Scope

Before making a responsive website, examine your target audience and audience. The aim is to find out:

The users get the web: Review your site’s traffic analytics and mix the insights with Test for the Right Devices report to understand the best browsers/devices inside your audience.

Do you know the website’s ‘core’ features: These must render uniformly across browsers/devices. The rest can be improved upon in later iterations.

Responsive Website Testing

After you have successfully developed a responsive website, you have to test to make sure it could:

Display and align the information consistently.

Render text legibly on all scales and viewports.

Keep content (text and images) in their containers.

Display and resize images if required.

Allow users to scroll vertically (or horizontally, as in true of responsive data tables).

Let users navigate via links and menus on all devices.

Scale/resize content based on portrait or landscape orientations in mobile devices.

In the responsive test, begin by manually testing your website on various viewport sizes to ascertain if this article scales to fit correctly. To get inconsistencies in colors, fonts, illustrations, etc. you need to execute a mobile responsive test using real mobile phones.

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