Responsiveness Of Website Design Towards Screen Resolution!

Published On :07 February,2012

 

 

 

Introduced by Ethan Marcotte, the concept of responsive web design makes reference to the process where UI & design adjusts itself to user's screen resolution. The initial concept of responsive web design was derived from the concept of responsive architecture, in which rooms and spaces have the capacity of automatically adjusting depending on the number and flow of people within.

 

The theory behind responsive web design refers to the utilization of several grids and layouts, images and CSS media queries to provide users the best possible experience in terms of navigability and readability, irrespective of the device where the site is being browsed. Devices rolling out with varying screen resolutions, orientations and definitions, have lead this concept to gain huge popularity in recent years. With mobile browsing expected to outpace desktop-based browsers in next few years, more customers are rethinking how their sites and applications are being browsed.

 

Fluid grids, flexible images and media queries are the three technical constituents for responsive web design. Rather than adjusting the content in to device specific environment, CSS media queries can be efficiently used to adjust resolution within different viewing context. Responsive web design involves the thoughtful process on the part of designers and developers to determine how to redistribute the elements so that the website automatically switches to accommodate for resolution, image size and scripting abilities. Flexible Grid, Flexible Images and Media queries backed with thoughtful & planned structure for different screen resolution make your design even responsive: -

 

Flexible Grid

The first major element of responsive web design is flexible grids, which maintains the complete design in terms of proportions, ensuring that all the elements in a layout are re-sized in relation to the resolution. The essence of flexible grid relies on calculating element's proportion in percentage units in order to acquire a correct re-sizing.

 

Creating fluid grids is fairly common practice, however, while developing fluid grid system to make your website look good and work in all kinds of screen resolutions, it's important to consider that all the fundamental information remains visible to the user without having to scroll, the text must be easily readable and the site should not suffer with the reorganization of components when the screen resolution varies.

 

Flexible Images

Another central aspect of responsive web design is flexible images. Images are simply re-sized through height and width attributes to keep the layout organized. Using CSS overflow property, images can be cropped to fit different screen resolutions.

 

Media Queries

Using media queries, designers can design several layouts using HTML documents and provide stylesheets based on selective features including browser size, orientation, resolution or color. Media queries effectively collects the data about the visitor and employ it to apply the CSS styles that can provide the best experience to the visitor.

 

CSS are used for establishing max-width, device-width, orientation and color parameters, which allows to apply specific CSS styles according to resolution, orientation and screen size. This method works fine in all devices offering media query support.

 

By establishing fluid grids and using fluid images along with media queries, designers can provide users' an enhanced experience in terms of navigability and readability, regardless of the medium they are browsing through.

 

 

Maneet Puri is the Managing Director of Lexolution IT Services, a renowned IT firm based in India, which strives hard to deliver it's clients with the cost-effective web designing and development services that can cater to their highest-valued business priorities. As responsive web design has gained huge popularity in recent years, our technical experts are eager to extend the umbrella of their web designing services to responsive web designing with a focus on browser compatibility and scalability.