If you are reading this post on your mobile phone or tablet, you would really appreciate what responsive design can do for you. It takes the stress out of browsing a website or any web content conveniently on the device of your choice. As the world moves to using more handheld devices with giant strides, companies who fail to keep step with responsive design are likely to fade away.
What Is Responsive Design?
Responsive web designing implies making the web design more flexible and smart to adapt itself in accordance with the browsers and screen size of end user’s device being used to access your website. Rather, in simple terms, it can be said that a single web design which will work for both desktops and smart devices. Every entrepreneur can take competitive advantage of the market by making smart moves by incorporating responsive web design to his business web portal.
Going the mobile way
No doubt that the world is moving in to mobile phones and smart devices. While more people are accessing the medium of websites and portals through different devices, there are multiple challenges such as screen resolution, user interactivity, navigational usability, inconsistent screen width, browser compatibility etc. The new age web designer needs to grapple with and conquer these challenges during web design and development.
As website owners, being Responsive in design helps reach a wider audience more effectively and quickly as people are accessing the web from their stationary desktops or on the move from tablets, smart phones etc. For this purpose, web engineers are mixing and matching different web technologies like CSS, Java script, JQuery, XHTML, etc. to find a perfect solution for responsive designing across cross platforms of mobiles, smart phones and desktops. But most touted among all is Media Queries.
Media Queries
CSS Media Queries offer the most liquid technical solution for achieving elasticity in web design. It helps in specifying style rules for different devices by setting conditions for screen width, and resolution. A website should be able to scale and adapt automatically when accessed from 1024X768 screen-based desktop or from a 320*480 resolution screen of a smart phone, and should be viewed without much differences. This progressive methodology makes it possible to make the design responsive in a simple manner without requiring multiple set of codes for traditional desktops and smart devices.
Potential of Media Queries
Embedding Media Queries in CSS helps us to change layout of the design exactly in accordance to the end-users’ device without any change in the informational aspect. A standard 1000 px wide layout can shrink into a single column of 400 px layout according to the browser window of the user’s mobile device – just with implementation of CSS media queries.
Media Queries are CSS3 extension of media type that controls how your styles are applied. It is a logical expression with a boolean variable which is either true or false. There are 10 different Media types in CSS which can be used to specify how the layout of a document will look like in different medias. And there are 5 methods which can be used to define Media types as well as media Queries.
The media Attributes which will be frequently used in responsive designing will be:
- Width
- Height
- Orientation
- Aspect ratio
Media queries are also cross-browser compatible as it is supported in Internet Explorer (IE) 9+, Firefox 3.5+, Safari 3+, Opera 7+, as well as on most modern smart phones and other screen-based devices.
Reverse Thought Creative Studio is a leading web design and development company based in Mumbai, India. The studio has been at the forefront of providing lasting first impressions using the best in design trends and technology for clients all over the world.
