How to Develop Responsive Web Application?
Mobile phones are taking over laptops and computers to perform tasks like online shopping, reading articles, etc. The era where people used to log into their desktops to access the internet is gone. Instead, the modern way is browsing the web through mobile phones.
Hence, developing a responsive website is necessary to deliver your content to anyone visiting your website via phone or any other device.
Responsive web apps are in trend. It’s a designing approach ensuring that a website or web app functions properly and looks good on all screens. It can be done by using fluid layouts and media queries.
So, the doubt arises- how to develop a responsive web app? Do not worry, this article is a perfect guide on how to build a responsive web app. Let’s understand more in detail.
Step-wise Guide on How to Develop a Responsive Web App
After understanding the necessity of developing responsive designs, it is now the time to understand how to create responsive web apps:
1. Use the Viewport Meta Tag
The primary step to developing a responsive web app is setting up the website. It can be viewed on different devices. For this, developers write a viewport meta tag in the HTML document’s head section. This tag tells the browser how to display the web pages as per the screen size, orientation, and resolution on which it’s loaded.
In the viewport meta tag- there are two different parts- the height and the width, and a scale value. Height and width tell the mobile browser how big the page should be to load on a particular device. For instance, if your page should be 500 oxen wide, then set “width=500”.
Here’s an example of how to set the viewport meta tag in the head section:
2. Using Media Queries
By using media queries, mobile browsers can know how to display your web page as per the screen size of the device. For instance, when you are using the web app from your phone as well as your desktop, the width and height will change. Here’s a simple line of code added in the CSS file to change the width as per the screen size:
@media only screen and (max-width:320px) {
.header {
width: 100%;
}
}Using the viewport meta tag, you can set up the primary size of your web page. But it can’t help you to change how it appears on various devices. That’s where media queries come into the frame. It’s a CSS rule that lets you target particular screen sizes, resolutions, and orientations.
@media only screen and (max-width:320px) {
.header {
width: 100%;
}
}While using media queries, you can customize the HTML document’s layout depending on the screen size and orientation. For instance, if you have a set of styles for mobile phones, another set is for tablets, desktops, etc. You can also include media queries to your CSS to tell it when to apply each style set.
3. Adding Responsiveness Using Fluid Layouts
Responsive websites are made using fluid layout techniques to become resizable automatically and fit into different screen orientations and sizes. Relative units such as ems or percentages are used instead of fixed values such as pixels, so that can increase or decrease as per the project requirements.
It’s a big deal as it means that your site will look good and fit the screen of any device. Hence, you can focus on building something visually appealing and fits different screen sizes. Ultimately it saves you money and time.
4. Responsive Images
Adding responsive images is an essential part of building RWA. They display different-sized visuals as per the gadget showing your website, which means it always looks proper no matter what the screen size is. It is especially functional for purposes like product images, as they are usually used on websites in various sizes based on where they appear.
Building responsive sites using responsive images will resize themselves to fit into different screen sizes. These images are called picturefill or srcset, and they function by verifying the browser’s width and displaying different versions of the same image. So, if someone is surfing your website using their phone, it’ll take more time to load heavy images.
5. Mobile Subdomains
It’s a good idea to use mobile subdomains especially when you develop different mobile versions of your website. It is done by creating 2 subdomains, or by using tools like Cloudflare (free) for setting up a separate domain with other server hosting.
However, this doesn’t mean that you will have to develop another website, it’s worth putting effort if you want to give a better user experience on smartphone devices.
6. Test Your Website on Multiple Screen Sizes
There are different ways of testing websites regarding how they perform on different screen sizes. The simplest way is to start the browser, resize it to the size on which you want to test, and lastly refresh that page.
As people are increasingly using tablets and smartphones to gain access to the internet, you should ensure that your website is user-friendly. Test your site using Google’s mobile-friendly test to know how your site will look on varied screen sizes. If there are any issues with the website and it’s not mobile-friendly, you should look into the process of its update.
Final Verdict
We hope that this article has helped you in some or the other way with understanding what responsive design is, how to develop responsive web apps, and ultimately make your app user-friendly. You might feel more confident about implementing responsiveness to your website.
Experts use the steps mentioned above to make your website more user-friendly and performative. Some beginners may find it a daunting task to build a responsive site. But once they stick to this process, it’s fruitful. Moreover, understanding scalable JS and CSS will make it easy for you to create a website that truly reaches all your users by being accessible.
With this, we hope that you have understood what primary steps to follow to make a responsive web app. For future updates, you can bookmark us. Till then, happy reading!
