Responsive Web Design is the most trending approach adopted in most of the modern web design designed and developed these days. This approach is more compatible with all the modern browsers with which a website becomes more powerful with respect to SEO, Page Speed, Mobile Friendliness and much more.
In this article, I will be providing you the basic idea about the Responsive Web Design Approach and its benefits. Let me drive and guide you through the whole process to make you understand the approach in a much better way.
What is Responsive Web Design?
Responsive Web Design is an approach to web design which is aimed to provide an optimal viewing and interaction experience such as easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning and scrolling across a wide variety of devices like mobile devices, tablets, desktops.
Concept:
According to Josh Clark, the Responsive Web Design approach can also be termed as “Content is like water” as per the illustration by Stephanie Walter.
You put water into a cup, it becomes cup.
You put water into a bottle, it becomes bottle.
You put water into a teapot, it becomes teapot.
A website designed using the RWD approach will adapt the layout to the viewing environment by using fluids, proportion-based grids, flexible images, and CSS3 media queries.
Why is it necessary these days?
In day-to-day life, the number of mobile users is increasing. Hence, It is becoming more important due to heavy traffic of mobile users.
This trend emerged a lot due to which Google has taken an initiative to boost the rating of the sites which are mobile friendly in their latest updates of Search Algorithm. This initiative from Google has done a net effect of penalizing the sites that are not mobile friendly.
Often, when a responsive web design starts with a large screen, designers can run into difficulty trying to squeeze elements onto smaller screens in later stages. By starting with the smallest screen size and working upwards, re-configuring the layout and enhancing features, this dilemma can be avoided.
This approach can also be applied to content, contextual features, and development specifically in the structure of CSS media queries.
Why it’s great?
- Eliminated Double-tapping and pinch-zooming on smaller screens to read tiny text.
- Menus and Buttons are formatted for easy clicking.
- Creates a single website for great user experience on various devices available.
Advantages of Responsive Web Design
User-Friendly
It obviously makes your website user-friendly because it can reformat into any screen resolution of almost any device.
These days when technology is upgrading like anything and every day new smartphones are being introduced, if you have a responsive web design, people will be able to stay connected with your website anytime anywhere which is having an add-on advantage of developing a responsive website to boost your website traffic.
Accumulated Sharing
Responsive web design also gives you as an owner of the website to be able to collect all social sharing links with a single URL. This will allow you to make positive contributions to a better and user-friendly website.
Search Engine Optimization
Search engines are also getting smarter with every passing day and they are intelligent enough to figure out the connection of mobile websites and desktop websites.
No Redirects
One of the simplest and biggest advantages of Responsive web designing is that you will not have to take care of any redirects and it involves no user-agent targeting. So, development-wise, it is a great thing when you are less responsible for handling redirects and targeted users.
Lesser Maintenance
By developing a separate mobile website, you are increasing your workload. You will be maintaining two separate websites. If you have a responsive website, the maintenance is very minimal because there will be only one layout that will be working for all sorts of devices which will obviously reduce your work.
Conclusion
Responsive web design is an approach, not a complete solution. Using responsive design will have many benefits while designing across devices. Designers must have to focus on the details of content, design, and performance in order to provide support of websites to users across all devices.
