Best Practices for Responsive Web Design

RWD allows a websites to respond according to user’s device i.e. as soon as the user switches from laptop to iPad, the website should automatically switch to accommodate for image size, resolution and scripting abilities. A website follows a responsive design approach with the help of fluid layouts, fluid grids and media queries. This eliminates the headache of creating a different version of the same website in accordance with every new device that is released in the market.

The best practices for RWD implementation are:

• Fluid layouts: This is an important part of a good responsive layout. To make a website adapt to various screen resolutions, fluid layout with widths defined in percent instead of pixels is used. The value in percentage is obtained by taking the element’s width and dividing it by the full grid size.
• Flexibility of Images: One of the most important aspects to make any website responsive is to make the images adapt the size of the parent container. The flexibility of images can be obtained by various ways like defining a maximum width of 100% or by using context-aware image sizing.
• jQuery : When it comes to web development, nobody can skip to throw a limelight on jQuery because of its high utility for web developers. There are a lot of jQuery plugins which can help in making a better responsive website such as supersized, elastislide, fitText and fitvids.
• Media Queries:CSS3 media queries basically allow you to gather information regarding site visitors and to use that information to conditionally apply CSS styles. With the help of media queries, the way towards larger resolutions can be worked upon in an efficient manner.

Besides these there are a lot of ways to make any website responsive such as using scalable background images, restyling the anchor tags , using large screen CSS as a default for users, repositioning the global navigation, using hybrid apps for hand held devices and a lot more.

A few people are still doubtful about the feasibility of a responsive design approach for websites, so let’s throw some light on the benefits of using this approach:

• Rapid Growth in the usage of mobile phones: As we all know, there is a tremendous increase in the use of mobile phones in the market. Hence, to gain heights in the business world, a website should be fully optimized to support any kind of device, inherently giving importance to having a design that is responsive in use.
• Time and Cost Effective: The cost and time that was used earlier in making separate websites for desktop and mobile platforms has been cut short by making a move towards RWD.
• Better usability: No matter which device is being used, a user will get a better view of the website which ultimately leads in increasing the sales from a business point of view.

The shift towards RWD has already started as most successful businesses have understood the importance of having such a website.