10 Basic Principles of Responsive Web Design

Responsive Web Design

TechsPlace | Responsive web design is the web development technology aimed at increasing the convenience of web page viewing on any permissions. The number of website visitors with phones and tablet PCs is getting bigger. Taking this into account, it is unreasonable to ignore this segment of Internet users and develop sites that are not adapted to modern gadgets.

Responsive web design allows you to display your site on any kind of device in the right way, help mobile users to search and find exactly what they need, and, of course, expand the borders of your business. Learning from an expert Miami web design company can give you a good picture of how your website should look like. According to Google, 90% of people use mobile devices to get the information they need. In addition, Google even encourages webmasters to follow best practices in the use of Responsive web design, as search engines are targeting sites with this design. So, there is a high probability to be in the first lines of search engines, therefore, your site will be visited by more users.

Talking about the advantages of responsive web design, it can be useful in:

  • increasing the number of devices with Internet access;
  • boosting the popularity of mobile devices with Internet access and mobile Internet traffic;
  • quick information.

You can see all the basic principles of responsive web design below:

  1. All the elements of the site are located within a modular grid.
  2. All the layout elements and media files (including images) are “flexible”, their sizes depend on the screen size. In addition to reducing the size of pictures, it is sometimes important that different pictures are suitable for different devices. After all, huge images (for hundreds of kilobytes) are not suitable for mobile devices that have data limitations and poor 3G connectivity.
  3. Working with Media queries – module CSS3, allowing you to specify different styles (or even style sheets), depending on the screen resolution, its size, and other characteristics.
  4. The speed of the site. The site, created according to the principles of responsive web design, can be loaded several times faster, as the user will need to download from the server only those parts of the design that are necessary for the operation of the site on his device. The meaning of the responsive web design is that the site dynamically adapts to the size of your device, and if the size of the screen suddenly widens / shrinks (like when resizing the browser or changing the orientation of the tablet), then the site will react immediately, without reboots and delays.
  5. Content-oriented design. Firstly, one must create the frame without excessive detailing, additional elements will be added later. Then, it is necessary to think about “adaptive” control points. For the content generated within the content strategy, a simple one-column layout designed for mobile devices will do.
  6. As the screen size decreases, the content begins to occupy a large height of the screen, and the underlying elements can be moved further away from the lower border of the viewing area. This is called “a flow”.
  7. Relative units of measure. The site should look equally well not only on large desktop monitors and on tiny phones, but also on all the variety of devices that are in their characteristics somewhere between these extremes. The necessary flexibility to our design can give the use of relative units of measurement. For example, if you set the width of the element to 50%, you can be sure that this element will take exactly half the screen on any device.
  8. Achieving the correct location of all the objects that are on the page. It is sometimes difficult to do it, but you can put a group of elements in a block, and then control the position and size of this block. This trick also simplifies the work with elements that have absolute dimensions, for example, logos and buttons.
  9. Use embedded fonts, but consider that each headset, downloaded from the Web, increases the load time of the page. Fonts already available on the client’s device are loaded instantly, but their appearance and compliance with the design concept are not good enough.
  10. One of the modern approaches to adaptive design is to first develop a layout for the smallest displays, and only then, as the size of the display increases, the elements are uploaded to the web page (progressive improvement) using JavaScript. The idea is not to force users from the phones to download unnecessary data, which they still will not see, thus slowing down the loading of the pages.

It is necessary to take into account all of these points, to have an idea about the process of building a site and selecting priorities for content that meets the requirements of the user. Everything is selected experimentally, only by transferring the theory to the practical plane, it is possible to understand all these nuances.

The web design industry is trying to keep up with the times and take into account modern realities when a huge number of mobile devices are produced. It’s time to expand the design horizon and make the scope of web design a little better – for every electronic device.