Today’s website has to deal with millions of users all over the world. With the rapid growth of diverse and multifunctional devices like smartphone, tablet, laptop, notebook and so on, user requirements for website design have changed. Clients now frequently ask for versions of their website to have support for multiple devices like Android, Blackberry, iPad, Nexus, Kindle etc., thus imposing more responsibility on developer’s shoulder. The solution here is addressed in Responsive Web Design (RWD).
What is Responsive Web Design: It is an approach in web design that enables websites to respond to visitor’s expectation; provide optimal viewing experience, support easy reading and navigation and rearrange based on screen size, resolution across a wide range of devices. A website designed to act responsively, when visited, figure out the viewer’s device resolution, screen size and adjust smoothly to eliminate distraction off viewer’s mind. This is how responsive web design eradicates the need for designing and developing differently for each new gadget in the market.
Responsive Web Design puts together some elements. It uses CSS3 media queries to adapt the layout to the viewing environment. Using fluid proportion-based grids helps to size page elements in relative units like percentage or EM. Images are used in flexible sizes that are resized to display them fit inside their container.
Advantages of responsive web design: There are great advantages of adopting responsiveness to web design. Some of them can be discussed for serious consideration.
- Responsive websites can adjust to any screen size, resolution or image size.
- Runs good no matter scripting is on or off.
- One website for all devices ensures reduced cost to develop a website.
- You have to expend once for your website.
- Optimization of a single website ensures single URL fetching all links, page rank, page authority etc. This gives one complete view for all the traffic across devices.
- Single website for all devices means you have to host one and once.
- A single website to be updated and devices are impacted differently.
- It also ensures fewer occurrences of errors.
- RWD removes any site redirect that websites tend to have.
- The issue with logging from different devices is resolved perfectly in RWD.
- A website responding the same to users of distinct devices helps to keep the brand value consistent for clients.
- No different logins are required to update different sites.
- Single instance of site is helpful in fetching entire traffic data in single analytics tool.
- Fix the Canonical URLs issue that you may encounter with having different sites for each device.
Limitations of Responsive Web Design
Major limitation of RWD at this time is the big market share of web browser that do no support CSS3 including Media Queries. Close to 14% of the web users still use IE8 and other old browsers that do not have support for media queries. Future works are in progress to find remedy to this.
It is possible to really make it a device independent web which has been acknowledged as a myth for so long now. RWD enhances that possibility bringing more sense, sociability and unity to web world. TemplateToaster support responsive web design.
