Responsive web design, should or should not use it

Have you ever opened a website from your PC then open it from your smartphone or Tablet? What did you notice? Maybe in some webpages the outlook still remained unchanged with reduced screen size while on others you got a completely different look.

Welcome to the world of responsive web design; it is abbreviated as RWD and refers to a technique web designers use to make web pages adjust their sizes with a reduction or increase in screen size of the browsing device. What a web designer would do is modify templates through professional coding to drop in size with a reduction in screen size

Has RWD been a positive web design tool? The truth is the idea has actually been around for quite some time only that websites haven’t found the concept a necessity in ecommerce. Responsive web modeling has a lot of benefits which online marketers should know about and may want to consider as a traffic attracting tool.

The idea of RWD is best understood by testing the concept in both a smartphone and a Desktop. There are a few websites that use responsive web a popular one being the Barack Obama website. The screen outlook on screen will appear exactly the same way when opened on the smartphone. Only the webpages modifies is size but leaves the functions just as they are.

Before we advance more with the benefits, it is important to know that responsive web design is built under three concepts;

• Fluid grids
• Media Queries
• Fluid images

Fluid grids refer to developing web content, templates around a liquid layout. The templatesand content remain fixed in nature which is the same in Tablets or smartphones. However when the liquid layout is applied after, it allows the web page to re-adjust its size to fit whichever screen it’s opened in. The term and concept is drawn from how fluids take up the shape of any container they are poured into.

Fluid images also follow the same pattern; if we used fixed images in all browsing devices, chances are the images may open over-sized or undersized when opened in different screens. However fluid images would adjust their sizes to fit whichever devices they are opened in.

Media queries on the other hand are concepts used to correct any errors in fluid grids and images. If the templates and images ‘ooze’ out on a different ‘container’ this may result in a fiasco. So media queries are basically constraints that prevent this kind of scenario from happening.

So why would a web user find responsive web interesting? Because it breathes the same familiarity of a webpage on a different device as viewed initially on a Desktop. So it means I have the privilege of using the same tools and viewing the same images without getting different functions brought in.

This kind of familiarity will prompt me to always open the website wherever I am. It gives me flexibility with the webpage allowing me to take it wherever I go. It also means I don’t always have to look for a laptop or Desktop whenever I want to open a particular page.

But online marketing businesses take the biggest chunk when it comes to benefits. Incorporating responsive web to your webpages means you never have to design several webpages to run on smartphones, laptops, Tablets and Smart TVs. It also means you don’t have to incur the cost of employing an extra designer to manage each of the new webpage designed for a different device.

Despite RWD being a concept from the past, it is becoming even more relevant in present day when the highest record of web usage is through smartphones and other portable gadgets. And we are now moving further into the smart TV age where I can watch my favorite ESPN show and immediately switch to my facebook page with my remote.

Responsive web design remains a very new way to use and manages only one website and make it available to the growing mobile-browsing market.

You can know more about RWD through Singapore based Agile Lab and even have a feel of what it’s about.