Responsive Web Design – The way ahead

In the recent times, the term “Responsive web design” has become a very familiar idiom for referring to web designing for varying displays. Since, it is a relatively newer term, not many people are aware of it and of the concepts behind it. In this current era where the need of P.C is just zero for web browsing because of smart-phones, tables and note-books, the need of responsive web designing has increased like never before. Responsive web designing has become an important part of our lives as it is more about using scalable images, and adjustable layouts to make web accessing on these smart devices easier and hassle-free.

 

The definition of responsive web design can be mentioned as something which facilitates businesses to increase the quality of web pages of their websites by optimizing them in such a way that they fit into huge category of internet enabled devices. This in turn, reduces the requirement of costly development methods which are usually specified gadget to gadget. With the help of responsive web designing, designers can create dynamic pages and designs which have the capability to re-position, reflow and resize itself depending on screen-size of the user’s internet enabled device.

 

According to experts, it is still an emerging craze and will stay till long time. It has been estimated that in 2012 only there will be a big flow of dynamic and responsive web designing as it will make web accessing through smart-phones, tabs, and other mobile devices very easy. This ease will expand the reach of the common people to many of the businesses through their websites which they will be accessing on their hand-held devices.

 

The images in responsive web design are actually fluid images that are replaced by context aware images which is an updated version for better quality designing. This serves the purpose of responsive web designing very naturally as those images changes themselves into different resolutions which range from larger screen images to small screen images. There are some tools which are used to make responsive web design a better and easier looking task. Let’s have a look on them.

 

Adobe Device Central CS5.5– this application is used to make production of innovative and engaging content for smart-phones, mobiles, tabs and other mobile devices straightforward. It gives the web designer a freehand to plan, have preview of and test the newly built application and put it on any of the mobile devices. Unique features of this software includes an online library of devices profiles, advanced device input emulation and HTML5 support.
 
Golden Grid System– this has been a very popular tool among web designers who have prior experience in the field of responsive web design. This application divides the screen into 18 equal volumes and considers extreme end columns as the outer margin. The rest of remaining 16 columns can be reset for tablet-sized screens by folding into 8 columns and for the mobile screens; they are further folded into 4 columns to fit the screen. Other noteworthy features of this tool are elastic gutters, zoom-able baseline grid and golden gridlet.
 
FitText– fittext is more of a JQuery Plug-in for inflating web type and fluid or responsive layout to get scalable headlines that is used to fill the width of a parent element. This tool brings flexibility to font-size and makes it adaptable on differently sized screens.
 
Gridless– this is also a versatile option when it comes of having trouble-free responsive web design. The best quality of fittext is that being an open-source, it is easy to work on and is compatible with all modern-day browsers. As an option of HTML5 and CSS3 boilerplate, it assists in responsive and cross-browser websites and beautiful typography.Skeleton– this is a boilerplate which is used for development of responsive and mobile-friendly websites. It is a small group of CSS and JS files which assists the developers in creating smarter looking web designs for iPhones and laptops with screen width of 17” or more. The main principle behind this is a responsive grid and swiftly starting and style agnostic.

 

These are some tools, which when incorporated for web designing, will create highly accessible websites which will help everyone in the long run. Entire world has gone viral over this new innovation called responsive web design as they have understood its necessity and importance for the upcoming future. In a very short span of time, responsive web design has emerged as a graceful and useful solution for those websites which were struggling to make their presence on mobile devices because of failing to meet the requirements of several internet enabled gadgets.