What is a responsive website?

| | 2 min read

Are you familiar with responsive Web design? If not, then it's high time you get exposed to it. If your business is not utilizing responsive web design to your advantage or planning to go for it any time soon, your business is surely at risk. However, what exactly is responsive design?

Any website which uses a responsive web design is called a responsive website.Responsive web design aims at optimizing the viewing experience of a viewer, which includes easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling. This is applicable on a wide range of devices, ranging from phones and tablets to desktop and laptop monitors.

An RWD designed website uses fluid proportion based grids, flexible images, and media queries to select the page layout based on the size of the viewing environment.

Purpose of a responsive website

A responsive website enables the website visitor or user to operate and utilize the website with ease, without compromising on functionality, from any device, small or large, using mouse or touch.

This type of website will have content that can be read and links that can be clicked or touched on without the need of constantly zooming in and out using touch gestures or other controllers.

Techniques involved in RWD

Fluid Grid Concept:The fluid grid concept calls for relative page element sizing scheme. An example is using relative measuring units such as percentage, instead of rigid or fixed or absolute measuring units like pixels or points.

Flexible Images:Flexible images are images sized in relative units, which changes size proportionally with change in viewable space of the web browser. The whole image is shown irrespective of the size of the viewing space.

Media Query:Media queries act based on the nature of the device on which the website is displayed, especially the width of the browser. Media queries allow the page to use different CSS style rules depending on the device being used.