How to Get Started with Responsive Web Design?

Responsive designing is an approach in web designing where development and designing of a site is skewed for responding to behavior of users. It also considers the environment, platform, screen size and orientation of users. There are several web designing templates that are designed to develop a responsive website. The practice incorporates use of flexible layouts and grids along with intelligent use of CSS media queries and images. As the user switches from iPad to laptop or smartphone, a responsive website responds automatically to the preference of users. This eliminates the need for designing and developing different designs for every possible Internet enabled gadgets in the market.

According to experts of responsive web designing, images should be flexible and the site is required to use media queries and fluid grids that help in getting through different views and contexts. These are basic components of responsive web designing and should be kept in mind while creating web designing templates. Here is a basic guideline that may help you in getting started with responsive web designing.

Media queries

Media queries are dependent on window size of the browser and determine parameters like screen resolution, orientation and color. They act as conditional comments that have the capability of indicating nature of used device, showing up certain layouts and developing its physical characteristics.

The device is being subjected to queries like – is the horizontal resolution less than 480px? In such cases if the screen resolution is smaller (like that of smartphone) the device will load necessary .css files, otherwise the link will be neglected. The plug-ins required to manage media queries include css3-mediaqueries.js and the classic jQuery plug-in. First one is the latest and its library promises to make Safari 2, IE5+ and Firefox comfortably apply CSS3 Media Queries. jQuery plug-in is quiet old and supports limited queries like max-width or min-width. W3 has included media queries as part of their validation specification for CSS3. Web designing templates are being designed according to such specifications.

Flexible grid

Defining own parameters for several objects like containers, spacing and columns in code is one of the greatest ways of creating a flexible design. Using standard CSS class of existing grid system may also work but it is desirable to build own grid that would be more efficient and flexible. Working on own parameters is recommended for defining space alignment size etc. Many expert designers prefer to get rid of pixels, using em’s and percentage for the layouts like units of measurement. As such, with flexible grids in place, measurement unit gets relative. However, that doesn’t mean that pixels can be neglected. They are considered as unique units while working with digital image editors.

Flexible images

Web pages that are crowded with images takes a lot of time to load on popularly used browsers and commonly used bandwidth. Images that scale and change their position with flexible grid are helpful for fast page loading. This essentially means scaling down of the images according to HTML attributes of width and height for creating more space. With this arrangement in place, smaller devices will load more space for text content and provide less space for images. Another way of scaling images is to crop them with CSS overflow property. Look for web designing templates that help loading flexible images.

Responsive web designing has emerged as a smart solution for websites that were struggling to meet requirements of several Internet enabled gadgets.

About Author:

Bruce Thomas is an expert web designer and understands the details involved in modern day web designing. He has designed many winning web designing templates. He recommends Template Kingdom for high quality website templates.

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