What’s Responsive Design?

Responsive Design lets websites ‘adapt’ to different screen sizes without compromising usability and user experience. Text, UI elements, and pictures rescale and resize based on the viewport.

Responsive design allows developers to publish just one list of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code for multiple devices, platforms, and browsers. Responsive design is device-agnostic and aligns with all the popular development philosophy of Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY).

But there’s more with it than that. It could be challenging to make a pre-existing site responsive, but the great things about purchasing responsive design ahead of time in the project far outweigh the trouble forced to achieve it.

This post covers the evolution of responsive design, principle components which render it work, along with a guide to creating and testing responsive web applications.

The Evolution of Responsive Design

Inside the late 1990s, when browser wars were effectively reaching a (shortlived) end, most users had one browser (Traveler) using one os (Ms windows). They had one device (desktop) with screen sizes that have been approximately consistent everywhere. Designing websites of these specifications didn’t involve abstracting differences between numerous browser engines, platforms, and devices-it could possibly be done with the different parts of static sizes.

Eventually, web-developers began creating components whose dimensions were specified in percentages in accordance with the viewport. This approach allowed the parts for the browser window. This philosophy came to be generally known as ‘fluid design’.

In 2010, Ethan Marcotte published an article in which he spoke of ‘Responsive Web Design’. The content discussed all of the devices that readers utilized to connect to the web-which meant accounting for screen sizes, browsers, orientations, and modes of interaction while creating content on their behalf. This short article changed just how developers approached website design.

Right at the end of 2016, mobile browsing overtook web surfing. This further emphasized the value of thinking mobile-first in the event it located web development.

Today, the market has over 9000 different cellular phones, with their own dimensions and graphics processing capabilities. Google prioritizes mobile-friendly websites rolling around in its serp’s. In 2019, you cannot improve your online reach with no responsive website.

Responsive Website design: Setting the Scope

Before creating a responsive website, have a look at your marketplace and audience. The target is to locate:

The way your users access the web: Look at your site’s traffic analytics and mix the insights with Test on the Right Devices report back to know the top ten browsers/devices with your audience.

What are website’s ‘core’ features: These must render uniformly across browsers/devices. The rest might be increased in later iterations.

Responsive Website Testing

When you have successfully made a responsive website, you have to test to be sure it could:

Display and align this content consistently.

Render text legibly on all scales and viewports.

Keep content (text and images) inside their containers.

Display and resize images as needed.

Allow users to scroll vertically (or horizontally, such as the situation of responsive data tables).

Let users navigate via links and menus on all devices.

Scale/resize content determined by portrait or landscape orientations in mobile phones.

Inside a responsive test, begin with manually testing the website on various viewport sizes to check if this article scales to adjust to correctly. To find inconsistencies in colors, fonts, illustrations, etc. you need to do a mobile responsive test using real mobile phones.

For additional information about website responsive test you can check this popular website