Few words about Responsive web design 0
Responsive webdesign. Nowadays this is the most popular topic in the web design industry. But what does it really mean? How does it work? I show you.
These days websites have fixed sizes that are optimized for monitor displays. Naturally the size has risen in the past few years as the resolution of the displays has also increased, together with other technological advances.
There is a problem, though! In the meantime, new players have appeared on the horizon: smartphones (iPhone, Android based phones), tablets (iPad, etc) and other gadgets (MP3 players with screens, Internet TV's). Obviously the display resolutions of these gadgets are different.
What can we do with our nice website, if we want it to look nice on mobile too? We need to pay extra cash for developing a mobile version. If we have lots of money we can pay more for the tablet version, too. It is easy to calculate, that these methods are not money savers.
So here is this new solution, called Responsive web design. Websites made with this method are fully compatible with nearly all multimedia devices. Practically, the webdesigner using this method can create three or more visual views of the website by increasing or decreasing the sizes of the site's elements.
Technically the Reponsive web design is based on 4 key points:
- Flexible layout::
The Responsive webdesign -based websites key elements and layout values are always created and measured in a percentages.
- Flexible images:
Images are also sized by using percentage values.
- CCS media query:
With CSS media query the visitor's display resolutions are easily gathered, along with other useful information. With these data at hand, our website's visual parameters are easily modified without using javascript. This is the key of Responsive webdesign.
- Javascript:
If we would like to, our website can have backward compatibility with older web browsers - but to achieve this, we will have to use javascript ... so, at the end of the day, we can't avoid javascript.
That's all folks, in a few sentences! I have now started to learn this new method and here is the book which already helped me a lot. It's title is Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte. If you are interested in this method, order this book or click on my second link and study the websites which are made using the Responsive Webdesign method.
Hello
This is the portfolio blog of Szabolcs Bakos, a freelancer web designer from Hungary. If you are interested, you can find more about the author or you can check his portfolio.