What You Need To Know About Responsive Web Design

Website design is an extremely creative and complex process. It can be approached, broadly speaking, in 2 ways:

• Adaptive design which can be approached from the client side or from the server side and
• Responsive web design, which quite a few industry experts are calling as the trend to follow in the future.

A client side adaptive web design approach relies on creating a website that can be built on existing content. One of the things that is necessary here is the knowledge of JavaScript. Server side adaptive approach does offer a higher degree of customization than the client side adaptive approach.

But if one is talking about customization, then probably nothing can come close to the degree of flexibility and customization afforded by responsive web design.

What is responsive web design?

Here, a web designer or developer has to cater for the multiple kinds of devices that will be used by people all over the world to access his website. Many a business organization starts with coming up with a mobile friendly web design and then taking it from there. Responsive web design is a very challenging and creative process because it needs to take care of all the various devices which can include smart phones, desktops, laptops, tablets and so on.

Why is responsive web design important?

To the end user, website interactivity is probably the one main criterion that he is going to use in order to assess whether a business organization is worth his time or not. He or she is not going to be too concerned with the kind of device he has used to access a particular website.

So, if he has had a great experience with a website from his laptop but cannot get the same kind of experience from his smart phone, then the chances are that a business organization will lose him.

This, simply put, highlights the importance of responsive web design. Interestingly, the world of web designing has indeed woken up to this kind of approach and it is becoming the default standard for many online businesses.

All over the world, mobile devices are being used to access the Internet in a big way. And this will impact the way business organizations create their websites.

How does responsive web design work?

One of the easiest ways in which responsive web design ascertains how it should interact with the user is by using something known as media queries. These media queries help a website automatically figure out the resolution of the device that is being used to access a particular website.

The images are flexible on a responsive website. The grids on a website built with responsive design are also fluid. Both these elements automatically adjust themselves to fit into the screen of the viewing device. Things like the sidebar disappearing and shrinking of images help a user get a rich experience even on a smart phone.

Thus, fluid grids, media queries and simple web design are some of the fundamentals on which responsive web design is built.