Posted on April 21, 2014

Why Responsive Website Design is Taking Over!

Every day, the number of electronic devices, platforms, and browsers that need to work with your site grows. Over the last few years the popularity of mobile devices and tablets has been growing at an astounding rate. More people simply prefer to browse the web with these new devices instead of traditional desktop computers. It is estimated that mobile browsing will overtake desktop browsing by the end of 2014. Nowadays, mobile devices come in all shapes and sizes so it is difficult to tailor design a website that fits each screen resolution. This is the start of where responsive website design starts to play a role.

The nature of responsive web design and development ensures a website can be viewed from any device, with any size screen, with an experience that gracefully moves from step-down to step-up. The concept aims to respect the fact that users want to view websites on their mobile phones with small screens, tablets with medium sized screens and also their computer or laptop. Instead of making finite fixed width websites for each device, responsive design adapts to all resolutions. This type of design is responsive because it constantly takes into account the properties of the device and the browser on which the user consumes the content. The website actually scales to fit the viewing device.

Responsive web design uses fluid grids, which let developers define how an experience will scale, as well as flexible images, formats and containers. Typically the so-called liquid layout has not been popular and traditional fixed width websites were standard. Now that screen resolutions are much more diverse the liquid layouts make much more senses.

Some of the advantages of responsive website design are:

Flexible web designs
Friendly way for device/mobile compatibility
No need to maintain separate content in different site file systems
No restrictions for screen size and orientation
Single application for all the devices
Distinct SEO advantage