Responsive Web Design at Its Best!

Everything is taking a sharp turn to mobile devices. Most businesses require their websites to be adaptable to mobile applications. And depending on the mobile technology being used by the client, the adaptability will be dictated by the mobile device’s application platforms – Blackberry, iPhone, iPad, Kindle, netbook – they will have very different web design requirements. So in the very near future, web designers will be scratching their heads to the madness posed by this trending.

For mobile site designs, three approaches are used : building a brand-new web design; use the existing desktop website and building a new website that looks good in both desktop and mobile screens.

Responsive design is the way to achieve the third mobile site design approach. Where web designers are getting to the point of not being able to keep up with the innumerable design requirements for each mobile device, responsive design principle is being adopted and enforced. The principle behind this approach is that the design should be able to adapt to the varying behaviour and environment given by the users in terms of screen size, orientation and platform. It’s basically saying that web pages can be created with stylesheets looking different on a desktop screen but can adjust the design properties to fit and display perfectly on smaller screens of mobile devices. The most important thing to keep in mind is that no matter how the sites look differently on different devices, the same URLs and coding to deliver content are used for all devices.

Some web designers are bent on maximizing responsive web design techniques for practical reasons. Rather than build new sites for each device and user, integrating the elements of the new web design approach will be far more practical and cost-effective for the clients. While the visual element may be dealt with using stylesheets, the issue on coding, on the other hand requires a little more than surpassing the 300kb network download.

Responsive Design Solutions

It is not in any way possible to overturn the trend of continuously expanding code for mobile users. But web designers have found ways to minimize the impact on web designs aimed at mobile devices :

• Make all design components flexible.

§  Resize the images by using stylesheets which can shrink a picture or image to fit the small mobile screen and which can select a different image file with compressed size or kilobytes to get away with slow or heavy download.

§  Consolidate external files and styles. Merge all CSS or JavaScript in one file. If there are less downloads, there will be few server calls which could result to less waiting time for mobile users.

§  Consolidate styles. Cleaning your web design styles of any redundancy will result in a smaller stylesheet.

§  Selective libraries. While these libraries can come in handy in specific situations, only selected data and information are pulled out from them. With a selective library, lengthy download is avoided.

• Showing and Hiding Content

Certain design platforms or applications allow for the ability to show or hide content with ease. In mobile web designs, considerations for simpler navigation, more focused content, lists or rows in lieu of multiple columns are taken in when creating a flexible web layout.

• Touch screens or cursors

This is easily dealt with for mobile design applications because most mobile devices are using touch screen technology.

These changes and adjustments will allow you to have a website design that will continue to satisfy desktop users while self-adjusting the design elements to fit the smaller screens of mobile users. That is responsive web design at its best!