Advantages and Disadvantages of Responsive Web Design

Every website is accessed via devices with different screen sizes and resolutions. Optimizing websites for mobile devices requires the implementation of responsive design. This is why most web developers now find themselves wondering how to make websites responsive in almost every project they handle. Start by redesigning your site with images and content scaled for smaller screens such as tablets and smartphones.

The features story takes up most of the room with its enticing image, showing that it’s the most important element. The smartphone view is cohesive and inviting, with all the essential elements presented in a clear visual hierarchy. Responsive, mobile-optimized web design can responsive web design boost your SEO rankings significantly through improved site usability, faster load time, decreased bounce rate and more. In addition to the initial-scale setting above, you will have to define minimum-scale and maximum-scale to set the minimum and maximum scaling of content.

Chapter 1. What Is Responsive Design?

This further emphasized the importance of thinking mobile-first when it came to web development. Setting max-width allows the image to adjust its size based on its container width. You may be wondering if responsive website design is worth the investment. After all, your current website might be getting the job done just fine. Convert all your fonts into web fonts, which are faster loading and much more compatible across browsers than other fonts.

The rest of this article will point you to the various web platform features you might want to use when creating a responsive site. Media queries allow the page to use different CSS style rules based on characteristics of the device the site is being displayed on, e.g. width of the rendering surface . The Content is not sized correctly https://globalcloudteam.com/ for the viewport Lighthouse audit can help you automate the process of detecting overflowing content. How to create sites which respond to the needs and capabilities of the device they are viewed on. If a style sheet made the layout too narrow, short, wide or tall, we could then detect that and switch to a new style sheet.

• When set, these can disable the user’s ability to zoom the viewport, potentially causing accessibility issues.
• Also, it is typical to run into issues with advertisement formats, especially on mobile devices.
• At each of these breakpoints, I use a media query to apply new and different rules to this group of images to lay them out how I want.
• Emphasize features that are critical to users taking the next step in the customer journey.
• For example, 767 pixels wide is our breakpoint for phones, so any screen size smaller than 767 pixels will render the mobile view, whereas anything larger than that will render a tablet or desktop view.

Images in Bootstrap can be scaled to the parent element using the img-fluid class. Screen-specific images can be rendered using the picture HTML element. That’s why developers use a combination of max-device-width and min-device-width instead. In this section, we’ll quickly take you through some responsive design basics. Simply enter the website URL, and the tool will show how the site looks on multiple devices . Picture, source, and img tags are combined so that only one image is rendered, and that it fits best on the user’s device.

Therefore the number of columns will change according to how much space there is. To see your media queries, open the Device Mode menu and select Show media queries to display your breakpoints as colored bars above your page. Classic readability theory suggests that an ideal column should contain 70 to 80 characters per line .

How to make Website Mobile Friendly?

That means your site displays appropriately whether opened on a 27-inch desktop, a nine-inch tablet or a five-inch smartphone. In this article, we look at seven powerful responsive website examples, so you can see what this web design approach looks like in practice and steal a little inspiration for your site. Net Solutions is a strategic design & build consultancy that unites creative design thinking with agile software development under one expert roof. Founded in 2000, we create award-winning transformative digital products & platforms for startups and enterprises worldwide. With a mobile website version, businesses risked duplicate content penalties.

The highest priority for designers is to maintain consistency across multiple viewports. A responsive site will adjust to any screen size, which is extremely important for your users. Responsive web design is a technique that’s used to make websites display in a way that adjusts to the size of the browser window and devices used by visitors. Given that there are over 8.48B unique devices in existence today, this functionality allow teams to create timeless designs capable of adapting to any device, regardless of its size or shape. Marcotte refers here to using code that prevents rich media files from exceeding the dimensions of their containers, as well as viewports. As the “flexible container resizes itself,” he explains, so does the visual within it.

New devices of different sizes are coming out every day, so approaching web design this way ensures flexibility across the wide and ever-evolving variety of devices. Mobile-first web design has gained ground over the past decade with the rise of mobile technology. Non-responsive websites display perfectly on desktop, laptop but not on mobile or tablets.

A responsive web design automatically adjusts for different-sized screens and viewports. With a responsive website, someone can browse your website from any device and it will still look and function perfectly. Responsive design refers to a site or application design that responds to the environment in which it is viewed. It encompasses a number of CSS and HTML features and techniques and is now essentially just how we build websites by default.

Effective Tips on How to Make a Website Responsive

More importantly, the look and feel of Klientboost’s website stays consistent across all devices, yet they’ve managed to tailor their user experience to each device. Dropbox has done a great job of using a fluid grid and flexible visuals to design a standout responsive website. Not only does the font color change to accommodate the background color when shifting from desktop to handheld devices, but the image changes orientation as well.

Google has recommended responsive design for smartphone websites over other approaches. In responsive design, design elements are developed to scale across a variety of device sizes. A responsive web design is just one version of the website that adjusts automatically based on the user’s screen size. As a single design, responsive web design is faster and cheaper, but a single mistake in image sizing or padding can impact user experience when adapting to smaller devices.

If a website has to be validated as responsive, it must be tested on multiple real browsers and devices. That is the only way to check the success of responsive design inreal user conditions. A fluid grid is divided into columns; heights and widths are scaled, not set to fixed dimensions. Additionally, 53.8% of web designers state that “not being responsive on all devices” is a major reason for a website to be redesigned. Naturally, website developers and designers put great emphasis on creating responsive websites in the first place.

Principle of Consistency and Standards in User Interface Design

When viewed on narrower screens, the featured issue on the right is cut out, and the content below is shortened and rearranged in layout, leaving only the essential information. Use these responsive web design examples as inspiration and apply the lessons we’ve discussed here to your own site to improve the user experience across all devices. This is in contrast to the desktop-first approach, where you first design the site for large screens, then cut and reduce from there for smaller screens.

If we consider the earlier floated example, rather than creating our columns with percentages, we could use grid layout and the fr unit, which represents a portion of the available space in the container. Since screen dimensions and width in CSS pixels vary widely between devices , content should not rely on a particular viewport width to render well. The min-width property sets a minimum browser or screen width that a certain set of styles would apply to. If anything is below this limit, the style sheet link or styles will be ignored. Anything above the maximum browser or screen width specified would not apply to the respective media query. When responsive Web design took off, many noticed that images were still changing proportionally with the page even if they were specifically made for the tiny screen.

In CSS Grid Layout the fr unit allows the distribution of available space across grid tracks. The next example creates a grid container with three tracks sized at 1fr. This will create three column tracks, each taking one part of the available space in the container. You can find out more about this approach to create a grid in the Learn Layout Grids topic, under Flexible grids with the fr unit. With multicol, you specify a column-count to indicate the maximum number of columns you want your content to be split into. The browser then works out the size of these, a size that will change according to the screen size.

The Building Blocks of Responsive Web Design

The same design element that may work swimmingly on a desktop may work horribly on a smartphone, or vice versa. Responsive web design is a web development approach that creates dynamic changes to the appearance of a website, depending on the screen size and orientation of the device being used to view it. RWD is one approach to the problem of designing for the multitude of devices available to customers, ranging from tiny phones to huge desktop monitors. You can add multiple media queries within a stylesheet, tweaking your whole layout or parts of it to best suit the various screen sizes.

Layouts, images, text blocks, components, everything must all be responsive. Similar to Treehouse, the area above the fold converts from two columns on desktop to one column on mobile, with the call-to-action button shifting from beside the copy to beneath it. Their website also loads in just 2 seconds on devices with 3G internet, which GSMA says will make up 70% of mobile connections through 2020. This keeps their bounce rate low and prevents users from getting frustrated. Unlike on desktop and tablet devices, where their signup form is a central focus, GitHub presents only a call-to-action button on mobile. “Fluid layouts [….] put control of our designs firmly in the hands of our users and their browsing habits,” Marcotte explains.

Best Practices & Considerations for Responsive Design

You can see how the heading switches sizes as the layout goes to the two column version. Responsive sites are built on flexible grids, meaning you don’t need to target every possible device size with pixel perfect layouts. Creating a non-resizable web page by setting a fixed width doesn’t work either; that leads to scroll bars on narrow devices and too much empty space on wide screens.

It’s perfect for devices that switch from portrait orientation to landscape in an instant or for when users switch from a large computer screen to an iPad. With max-width, you’re designing the desktop version first and scaling down from there. The opposite is true for min-width designs, making this the best practice today, with the majority of website users browsing on mobile.

On April 21,Google announcedthat mobile-friendliness was now a ranking symbol, meaning mobile-friendly, responsive websites appeared higher in the search results. There have been a few updates since then, each one including mobile-friendliness as a key rankings indicator. A site that is responsive takes all of this into account and automatically adjust to provide visitors with the best possible user experience regardless of the device being used to access the site.

The points at which a media query is introduced, and the layout changed, are known as breakpoints. At the time, the recommendation was to use CSS float for layout and media queries to query the browser width, creating layouts for different breakpoints. Fluid images are set to not exceed the width of their container; they have their max-width property set to 100%. Fluid images scale down when their containing column narrow but do not grow larger than their intrinsic size when the column grows. This enables an image to scale down to fit its content, rather than overflow it, but not grow larger and become pixelated if the container becomes wider than the image. “Ten by Twenty” website image resizing and flexible content example.On wide screens and browsers, all of the content on this simply designed website is well organized into columns, sidebar and simple navigation up top.

In this image, you can see that the fixed version of the content has the same width regardless of the device, whereas in the fluid version, the content fills the available screen space of the device. In print, publishers determine the size of what is displayed in absolute measures. When the internet arrived, this trend continued, and designers defined websites in pixel sizes. In this image, you can see that the fixed version of the content has the same width regardless of the device whereas in the fluid version the content fills the available space depending on the device size. We have edited our responsive grid example above to also include responsive type using the method outlined.