What is responsive design?

What is responsive design?

Responsive Design is not the same as mobile design. Mobile design entails creating an entirely new website or web app with content specifically created for the mobile experience. Responsive Design, on the other hand, means that the same domain, the same content, and the same syntax — more or less manipulated by JavaScript and/or CSS3 Media Queries — respond to different viewports to provide the best user experience possible for each device. The different viewports include desktop monitors, laptops, tablets, and mobile devices and their corresponding orientations.

Responsive Design, as the underlying base of a websites’ deployment, uses flexible or fluid grids, fluid images, and CSS3 Media Queries to adapt to the viewers’ different device widths and resolutions. Developing Responsive Design is rarely a process with an ending, but rather it’s an ongoing effort to optimize the user experience on different viewpoints. As more and more different devices with access to the web enter the market, it is essential that a website can fluidly adapt to multiple screen sizes. Web developers and designers have to go through a shift in thinking about how to cater the design to different viewports. A website needs to look good but, most importantly, it needs to be equally usable on a smartphone, tablet, e-reader, and desktop or laptop.

A 2012 TechCrunch Survey predicted that by 2013, mobile devices would overtake desktop PCs as the dominant global Internet platform, with a projected 1.9 billion users on mobile devices in 2015, compared to “only” 1.6 billion desktop internet users. So why haven’t you started creating responsive websites yet?

Responsive Design may have started as a trend, but it has quickly become an evolutionary step in web development and design that has greatly affected design and technology.

There are a lot of advantages to implementing responsive web design. Here are a few:

Pros of responsive web design

Lots of advantages come with the implementation of responsiveness in web design, here are a few:

  • It saves money. The customer only has to pay for the development of one website. No mobile apps or mobile websites are necessary. There’s only one website that needs support too, so this cuts down on monthly web support costs. Publishing new content is easy when there’s only one place for it to go. So no matter who is doing the updating, it’ll save a lot of time (which translates into dollars pretty easily).
  • It saves time within reason.With the right planning, RWD can allow for some efficiency because you will not have to create all new content for every channel you want to reach. Instead, you simply need to adjust the amount and layout of the visual content that you have initially created. From a responsive “code” design perspective, programming and deploying stand-alone code for multiple channels is not required. Efficiency is gained because one “set” of code can account for the additional channels, allowing for a single code change to migrate across every channel.
  • It helps your SEO efforts. With a consistent URL for desktop and mobile users and desktop and mobile search bots, any site you design has uniformity. This makes for better user interaction, is easier for Google’s link algorithms, and increases crawler efficiency.
  • It lets your website perform better. Planning ahead for RWD, especially using the mobile-first-approach, can lead to cleaner and, therefore, faster performing code on mobile and desktop size devices.
  • It lets your customers find information easier – anytime and anywhere.Using RWD in your site design means the website will get a lot more visitors who are using different mobile devices, such as smart tablets and phones. A visitor is a lot more likely to buy products and services from a website that actually works on their devices.

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