What Is a Responsive Website Design?

By  //  April 12, 2013

Responsive Design - The Latest Web Trend

responsive web designA responsive design allows a website to adapt and change its appearance for different screen sizes of smartphones, tablets, desktops and laptops. As a result, responsive website designs allow optimal viewing of your website no matter the screen size or device. Pretty cool, huh? It is also commonly known as adaptive website design or fluid website design. Websites which don’t have a responsive design are unable to adapt to different screen sizes and can be quite difficult to view and navigate on smartphones or other small devices.

 

It is a trending technique.

It trended heavily in 2012 and continues to gain steam in 2013.

Every day, responsive web design is getting more and more popular. It trended heavily in 2012 and continues to gain steam in 2013. Many developers have begun offering responsive web design as a primary element to our web services. As a relatively new concept, it’s tools and techniques are still improving and developing with new ideas coming into play every day. One may find a host of evolving information on this topic across the web with all sorts of different methods to achieve the same goal.

 

So, how does it work?

Responsive Web DesignResponsive web designs have a unique script which detects the screen size and works accordingly. A responsive design can detect if the website is being viewed from a smartphone, tablet, desktop or laptop using various techniques. Once it has established which device is being used or what size the screen resolution is, it uses CSS to display the website in an appropriate format. In order to fit smaller screens, images can be easily reduced, menus changed, columns stacked, elements hidden and text enlarged to name a few of the items we can work with.

 

Why responsive design?

As more and more consumers and business owners browse from their phones and tablets, it has become more important than ever to display websites properly on all devices.

A responsive web design enhances the overall viewing experience for users and can be a major factor in customer interaction and the overall ease-of-use of the website. With a responsive website design, your potential customers will not be annoyed by small text and difficult navigation (no more trying to tap that little link!). Ever been to a website on your phone or tablet and just couldn’t deal with how hard it was to read or navigate? As a result of this incredible ability to display the website in adapting formats, when a website is developed using responsive techniques there is very little reason to have a second website for mobile, unless your business needs to market its products & services to mobile users in a method that is only capable through a second site.

As more and more consumers and business owners browse from their phones and tablets, it has become more important than ever to display websites properly on all devices. More than ever, users expect to be able to read your website, click your menu items and find your phone number without squinting or hitting the back button 18 times to try once more to click on that tiny link that goes to your services page.

Here are some websites that Rock Paper Simple has
developed that use responsive design:

 


Joshua Adams is JoshWebGuyWritten by Joshua Adams at Rock Paper Simple

Joshua lives and breathes web development and internet marketing and is passionate about not only providing quality service, but also educating fellow business owners about internet marketing and web presence.

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