Responsive Design

What Is Responsive Design?

Before responsive design became standard practice, bloggers maintained different webpages for different platforms. So, a site could have the homepage of its desktop version at yourdomain.com and the homepage of its mobile version at m.yourdomain.com.

However, with responsive design, site owners only need to maintain a single site. This site then automatically adapts to different devices and screen sizes. This improves the user experience for visitors and simplifies the site’s development and maintenance.

A site can be made responsive by including media queries in its CSS code. For example:

@media screen and (max-width: 768px) {
  body {
    font-size: 14px;
  }

  .container {
    width: 90%;
    margin: 0 auto;
  }
}

The above media query instructs the browser to apply the following CSS styles when the screen width of the viewing device is 768 pixels or less:

• Set the font size of the body to 14px
• Set the width of the container to 90% 
• Set the container to center horizontally

Importance of Responsive Design

Before responsive design became standard, bloggers and developers created separate versions of their websites for various devices. So, it was common for sites to have different versions for their desktop, tablet, and mobile users.

Some sites even took it further by creating different versions for different screen resolutions. Many sites even had different versions for the popular devices of the day. For instance, some sites had different versions for their iPhone, Blackberry, and Samsung users. 

This complicated web development, as these sites and versions were managed separately. It was unsustainable then, and would have become worse today with the growing number of devices and screen sizes. 

This was the point where bloggers switched to responsive design. Instead of creating different versions or even sites for different audiences, bloggers instead created one website that adjusts to the visitor’s device. 

This improves the user experience for visitors as they can access a site irrespective of their device. It also benefits bloggers who only need to maintain and optimize one version of their site instead of creating and managing multiple sites and versions. 

Responsive design is even more critical in this era of mobile-first indexing, where search engines consider the mobile version the primary version of the site and, as a result, give it more importance and crawl it more often. 

Google also considers mobile friendliness a ranking factor. This means sites that offer mobile users a poor user experience will encounter issues ranking on search results pages. 

Principles of Responsive Design

Responsive design is built around several core principles, including:

• Fluid grids
• Media queries
• Flexible images
• Responsive typography
• Mobile-first approach

These principles are what make sites responsive and ensure they function well across all screen sizes and devices.

1 Fluid Grids

A fluid grid system defines the layout width using relative units like percentages instead of fixed units like pixels. This allows the elements on the page to scale depending on the screen size. For example, a container set to a width of 80% will automatically resize to fit 80% of the display screen. 

2 Media Queries

Media queries are CSS rules that cause the elements on a site to change depending on the device’s screen size or characteristics. These queries typically specify the breakpoints, which are the screen widths where the site would change its layout. 

For example, a CSS rule like @media (max-width: 768px) can cause a site’s navigation bar to switch from a horizontal bar to a collapsible menu when viewed by a device no larger than 768 pixels.

3 Flexible Images

Flexible images increase or reduce their sizes to fit into their containers. Without this flexibility, these images will overflow, and can only be viewed with a scrollbar.

If there is no scrollbar, the visitor will notice the overflow but cannot view the part of the image that overflows, unless they have a larger device. Flexible images are specified using CSS rules like max-width: 100%.

4 Responsive Typography

Responsive typography is the practice of scaling the text size based on the screen’s dimensions. This is often achieved with relative units like em, rem, or dynamic functions like clamp(). This ensures the text remains legible irrespective of the screen size.

5 Mobile-First Approach

The mobile-first approach is a website development technique wherein developers design their sites for smaller screens before scaling to larger ones. This helps to prioritize the development of websites for mobile users, who form the majority of web users today.

6 Content Prioritization

Content prioritization is the practice of deciding the most essential webpage elements to display for mobile users. It is essential that mobile users see the most valuable content first. So, bloggers and developers identify the most important content and ensure it is available to mobile users. 

For example, a news website might prioritize showing headlines and brief summaries to mobile users, while pushing less essential content, such as advertisements or extended articles, further down the page or hiding them behind expandable sections. 

However, the same site can display more extended summaries and even sidebar ads to desktop users with larger screens.