What exactly is Responsive Web Design?
Put simply a responsive website, unlike a normal website, will change it’s layout in response to the device and screen size it is being displayed on, this then gives your visitors a much better user experience.
A standard website will possibly display on a phone screen but the layout is designed for a larger computer screen, where as smaller screens require a different layout to be easy to read & navigate.
A responsive website will alter the layout, resize images and display the navigation in a way that is easy to use for the visitors to your Website that use mobile devices.
Converting an old website to be responsive is expensive and inefficient as responsive design needs to be integrated at the initial stages of design and development of the site.
All our £99 websites use responsive design technologies so that you don’t miss out on the many mobile users of the internet. As of late last year according to the BBC nearly half of internet users use mobile devices and this number is rising, don’t miss out on all this traffic with a poorly designed website.
The following Quote from Wikipedia explains, rather technically, what responsive web design is about.
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Responsive Web Design (RWD) essentially indicates that a web site is crafted to use, an extension of the @media rule, with fluid proportion-based grids, to adapt the layout to the viewing environment, and probably also use flexible images. As a result, users across a broad range of devices and browsers will have access to a single source of content, laid out so as to be easy to read and navigate with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling.
“Mobile First” and “Progressive Enhancement” (thought processes/strategies for when a new site layout is being considered) are related concepts that predated RWD: browsers of basic mobile phones do not understand media queries, so it is wise to create a basic web site then enhance it for smart phones and PCs — rather than attempt “graceful degradation” to try to degrade a complex, image-heavy site to work on the most basic mobile phones. Luke Wroblewski has summarized some of the RWD and mobile design challenges, and created a catalog of multi-device layout patterns.
Ethan Marcotte coined the term Responsive Web Design (RWD) in his article in A List Apart. He describes the theory and practice of responsive web design in his brief book on the subject. .net Magazine chose Responsive Design as #2 on its list of Top Web Design Trends for 2012 (Progressive Enhancement was #1), and listed 20 of Ethan Marcotte’s favorite responsive sites.
Since Ethan Marcotte’s original book on the subject, another book has addressed the subject in specific reference to HTML5 and CSS3; ‘Responsive web design with HTML5 and CSS3’ by Ben Frain. ‘Implementing Responsive Design: Building sites for an anywhere, everywhere web’ by Tim Kadlec should also tackle the subject but is not yet released (due August 16, 2012).
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