What is a Responsive Web Design
Responsive website means a website that responds to the environment on which it runs. There are two types of web designs viz. adaptive and responsive. Adaptive web designs use multiple fixed width layouts while responsive web designs uses multiple fluid grid layout. Fixed width layouts are generally used for large and medium websites. Fluid width layout is used for small websites. Instead of pixels or points, the layout is designed through percentage.
Why use Responsive Web Design
These days number of devices, platforms, and browsers are increasing day by day. According to a survey more than 80% mobile phones sold in the year 2011 were web enabled and almost 30% web user’s access web through mobile. There are various sized screens like computer screen, ipad, blackberry screens, other mobile phone screens, etc. Some screens are large some are medium and small. Problem arises that how can a website fit according to the screens of such variety of devices. Answer to this problem is responsive web design. Using the approach of responsive web design, a web page can adjust itself on the device it’s being displayed on. Responsive web design takes into account Cascade Style Sheet media queries to fit into different screen size, color, resolution of the device on which the website is to be displayed.
How to confirm whether a website is responsive or not using your computer screen
To check whether a website is responsive or not, trace the following steps. Open website in your browser. Now resize your browser to smaller size and check whether the layout of the website fits the browser size in real time or not. If it fits it beautifully, the website is responsive.
Is responsive web design beneficial for designers?
Yes. It frees the web designer from the worries of making different sized designs for different devices/ screens. It saves time and panic of making different sites or redirecting the website to different versions made by designers for different devices.
Audience and device aware (ADA)
Audience and device aware means a website is enough capable to attract a user through their individual’s electronic devices either it is a system or mobile. A webmaster crafts a website first for mobile devices for ensuring the efficiency of a website on small screen devices.
In the layman’s language ADA is an approach to describe the user’s wants and the effectiveness of the websites over the devices used by them.
Audience and device aware is another concept for webmasters and have a completely different identity that neither affect the RWD concept nor affect web designing. It is more focused over the user’s devices and effective usability of a website.
What are the challenges in Responsive Web Design?
There are different challenges that can be measured through different tests and validations in a responsive web design. One of the major challenges in a responsive web design is the banner advertisements that are more valuable for the advertisers as well as for the website owners.
Banner advertisements aren’t fluid, which makes a senseless space or informal difference in the web designs when it compacted to mobiles. Well, for that webmasters uses different sized banners for the advertisements with different landing URLs.
There is one more challenge for webmasters in the responsive web design and it is video implementation in a responsive website. Videos are also not fluid and similarly as banner advertisements, they are more useful for information sharing.
Conclusion
It’s completely necessary in the current era that if you really want, your website earns for you then you should design it according to your customer’s wants. If a website is compatible with all devices then definitely it enhances the user experience. This compatibility is known as responsiveness and the web design is called responsive web design.