We will look at responsive web design but before that a little history of the web. In the early days, websites were only text-based along with some hyperlinks. If you want to see, how the first-ever website looks like you can view it here. As we all know, to create the basic structure of the website we require HTML. And it stands for HyperText Markup Language. English computer scientist Sir Tim Berners Lee invented HTML. He also invented the World Wide Web(WWW) which is commonly referred to as the web.
At that time, There were few web browsers were available. Like WorldWideWeb, Erwise and ViolaWWW.Mosaic emerges to be a much better browser from them as a result, those web browsers were discontinued. As Mosaic has an intuitive interface, personal computer support, reliability and Easy installation made it popular on the web. Since then, the web has changed a lot from the introduction to new web languages to Web Browsers.
Nowadays, several things come into the website design. Like Web graphic design, User Interface design(UI Design in short), User Experience Design (UX), Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and so on. Websites were designed especially for the larger screen such as the desktop and laptops. But with the increase in the use of internet-based Handheld electronic devices. Website responsiveness has become a crucial part. This increases the significance of responsive web design.
So, you may be wondering now what is a responsive web design? responsive web design (RWD in short)is an approach that aims to design and develop websites that look good on different devices. And this provides a better experience of the website to the users no matter what device they are using to access that site.
Steps to consider to make responsive web design:
- Media Queries: The media queries property of CSS(short for Cascading Style Sheets) allows us to make the website responsive for different screen sizes. Those who don’t know what Does CSS do? Cascading Style Sheets main task is to style the web pages in easier and flexible ways.
- Frameworks: We can use a framework such as bootstrap that will help us to create responsive web design better and faster. If you don’t want to use bootstrap, then there are several other frameworks as well Like Pure, skeleton, Materialize and so on to try. But before going for frameworks you must have a good understanding of HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
Pros and Cons of Responsive Web Design :-
Now let’s discuss the pros and cons of responsive web design. So, first of all pros:
Pros:
- Better user Experience: Since the layouts of the website automatically get adjusted according to the screen size of the device, users get a better website experience. They can browse the website on their favourite device such as on Android, IOS, PC, Laptop, Tablets without any problems.
- SEO Friendly: SEO Stands for Search Engine Optimisation is nothing but a practice to improve website ranking on search engine results pages. A better site optimised for Search Engine such as Google will appear more in the top results of relevant searches. A responsive website is SEO friendly as Google gives preferences to mobile-friendly websites.
- Cost-Effective: With the help of a responsive website design one doesn’t need to maintain different sites for different devices. This reduces the design cost as one site is sufficient for all of the devices.
- Easier to maintain: With the above-mentioned point, if there is one site for every device, then we have to change in one site to reflect changes for different screen sizes. So this makes it easier to maintain.
Cons:
- Load Speed: If you use frameworks, they contain a lot of CSS and JavaScript codes as in the case of Bootstrap, which results in longer loading time in slow net speed. Ultimately users will leave the site if it takes much longer than expected.
- Poor Compatibility to Internet Explorer browser: Older versions of Internet Explorer doesn’t support responsive web design well.If the target audience visits the website in IE6, IE7 or IE8.Then responsive web design is not the right thing to go with.
I hope that this post gave you some idea about what is responsive web design and why we should go for it. If you want to become a better web designer then you should look at this post here. In which I have listed 5 essential skills for a web designer. Okay, that’s all for this post. Thanks.
