Responsive website: A responsive website is a modern web design technique that makes a website’s content, layout, text & image size, user experience, pixel density, and user interface flexible, reactive, accessible, readable as per the display area, width, or size of the user device.
This means that the website visitor and the user on whichever device the website is opened, the website adapts itself according to the visible area of the same device.
These days, responsive web design is one of the reasons behind the fastest, high quality, good design, and successful websites.
So, it’s not only important for website designers to check the website experience, content, and design on mobile/tablet and different screens but also equally important for the website owners.
From a business point of view, responsive web design is like the responsive behaviors of a salesman or businessman with different types of customers.
For example, not all users buy the same product and not all customers communicate equally. Each one has its own behavioral pattern. But salesmen or business owners have to remain flexible, fast, calm, and composed in various interactive sessions to not let customers go out without buying products or solutions. That’s called responsiveness too.
It’s similar to the website through responsive design.
Screen size or visual area or viewport are different in mobiles, tablets, laptops, and desktops. Not only there are differences in screen size or visible area in mobile, desktop, and tablet. But different companies’ mobiles phones also have different screen sizes.
In smartphones the viewport or screen area or sizes are different as you can find it below:
- Apple iPhone 8 Plus device with is 1080 px;
- Samsung Galaxy S device width is 480 px;
- Oppo A37 ‘s device width is 1920 px;
- Sony Xperia Z5 device width is 1080 px;
In Monitor/Laptop/Desktop Screen or viewport sizes:
- Dell XPS 13 device width is 1920 px;
- Apple MacBook Pro -13-inch width is 2560 px;
- Dell Inspiron 14 Series is 1600 px;
- Google Chromebook Pixel view port size is 2560px;
View Port size in tablets:
- Apple iPadPro – 2732px;
- Microsoft Surface Pro 4 – 2736 px;
- Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 – 600px;
- Asus ZenPad 8.0 – 1280px;
- Toshiba Thrive – 800px;
Source: Here you can see the screen sizes, viewport sizes, and pixel density of popular mobile/tablet/desktop as per the company and model: screensiz.es
How does it work?
You can see that not all monitors, tablets, laptops, and mobile devices share or have the same size, pixel density. So, to provide a good, easy-to-use, flexible interface and quick experience to use the website or web application, it’s important to build and have a responsive website.
So that website can change its display and visible pattern as per the user’s devices (laptop/desktop/TV/Mobile/Tablet). And by using web design code or through CSS media queries in stylesheet.css or bootstrap responsive websites are created.
And when users see and access the website, content, and feature in the browser on desktop/mobile/tablet it remains easy or usable and alive as per the device.
Users don’t have to spend time finding options or menus and nor they have to use zoom or scroll features to right, they just get what they need immediately.
Non-responsive website example:
As you can see in the above picture, that website looks good and easy to access in larger screen size or in the viewport. But in small screen size text and menu are missing. Users have to scroll to right and many times zoom in to see what’s in.
In a responsive website example, you can see that text, images, menu, advertisements automatically fit the viewport or screen size or visible area of the device. And it’s also passed the google mobile-friendly test. Now you can see clearly which design is best for the website or web application users. Obviously, responsive websites provide a great user experience in all types of screen sizes and viewports. That’s why responsive website design is not only important but mandatory.
Thousands of older website owners posting jobs online to convert their non-responsive websites into responsive websites. Due to the increment and flexibility of using the internet in smartphones every business, blog, directory website owner wants to stay with the trends without losing the business.
How responsive web design came into mainstream design practices?
The website design was only created from the perspective of desktop or monitor screen size. And that time, the internet, web browsers were not accessible on mobile devices or even no one uses the internet on mobile. But after the revolutions of smartphones internet is accessible and users can do use the internet as they use it on a computer.
The goals of smartphones designer, mobile operating systems such as android, iOS, touch screens, and various components were to make mobile phones smart. And when people started using and access the websites on mobile phones, they find it difficult to use and they didn’t get the same experiences as they were getting on the computer.
Those problems invented or developed the new stream of website design that we called responsive or mobile-friendly websites.
Today, clients want to see website design or web application mobile-friendly before they see the desktop or laptop test. Today, website responsiveness is mandatory in website design.
Importance of responsive websites:
No one likes to zoom in/scroll to the right to watch and read content and use applications or websites. Everyone wants the faster and best user experience. Responsive websites/applications make it possible to access/input and get output faster without the use of technicalities. Not all know that they have to scroll the website layout towards the right to see where is the contact menu or submit exists. In earlier days, websites were not responsible and flexible.
But today, through responsive designs website content, structure, image size, font size increase/expand/decrease/reduce as per the user device viewport. And due to that everything in a website is visible as per the responsive design without losing, distracting, and confusing the website visitor or user.
Advantages of the responsive website over the non-responsive website:
I have seen more advantages of responsive websites than non-responsive websites. Even these days due to the use of CMS, Website Builders responsive website creation is not a big deal. There are ready-to-use methods such as bootstrap, responsive templates, responsive WordPress themes, and builders.
Anyone who creates a website these days creates a responsive and mobile-friendly website automatically.
Yes, it’s a little difficult or complex to convert a non-responsive website to a responsive one. But what are the advantages, let’s find it below:
- The responsive website provides a great user experience. It changes its visible pattern, structure, content as per the user device. And it looks like it’s designed for that device. User/website visitors feel happy to use it. What best any website owner wants other than happy customers/visitors/users on their website.
- Website loading speed in user device matter in this era. Responsive websites load faster than non-responsive websites. It’s because non-responsive websites have to load the same structure and content on small devices. And it takes time. But user/website visitors left the websites within few seconds when they see a small text size and too many details invisible points. And many those who are technical do not find it to the trends they see on other websites. You can still see, non-responsive government websites load very slow and have lots of errors these days’ when opened in advanced browsers, websites display errors and load very slowly. This is why a responsive website is important and why it’s important to upgrade a non-responsive website into a responsive one.
- When user experience, loading speed is high then it indicates search engines to rank the website higher on the results. It means search engines prefer to rank higher or send more traffic to responsive, quick loading, and good user experiences websites than non-responsive websites. And that benefits responsive website owners over non-responsive ones.
- Even not only the website, the advertising, and marketing content have to be responsive. So it looks great. That’s why there are more advertisers for responsive ads than fixed-size ads.
Google prefers and promotes more responsive advertisements for a publisher than fixed-size ads.
Responsive advertisements adapt their size as per the user’s device. These days by using AI tools or Artificial intelligence design applications automatically create responsive advertisements, branding, and marketing materials.
So overall responsive website is more beneficial to create and use than non-responsive and fixed-width size websites or structures.
How responsive website, web application or web design is created?
You can see in the highlighted text that the viewport is defined inside the header tag. It means web browsers automatically present the content and structure of the pages, columns, width, height as per the user device.
If you’re using WordPress to create a website then it comes in almost all of the WordPress themes. Most of the WordPress themes today are responsive.
But when creating a web page manually such as a landing page for the pay per click leader generation funnel then it’s important to set defined in meta viewport to make a landing page or lead page responsive and adaptive to the user device.
Example:
For mobile phone:
@media (max-width: 480px){
.site-branding img {
width: 120px;
}
}
/* Tablet */
@media (max-width 768px){
.site-branding img {
width: 250px;
}
}
/* Laptop */
@media (max-width: 1024px){
.site-branding img {
width: 320px;
}
}
You saw that. site-branding img width is defined as per the standard viewport of the devices. It means when the device’s max-width is … px, then the image size automatically adjusts itself.
Similarly, font size, layouts, columns, rows, headings, the text is designed and adjusted.
These media queries or CSS queries are defined or written in the stylesheeet.css file that is defined in the header of the webpage and in the header file.
You can also use the style along with HTML code, but the best practice is to use separate files for styling or designing web page content.
Conclusion:
Responsive, mobile-friendly website is the demand of the yesterday. If you haven’t done it, then you have to do it today.
Still, new techniques are emerging each day in responsive web designs, content, and mobile-friendliness of the website. You have to stay and update yourself as per the trends.
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