So we all know that a growing number of pages on the web are viewed using tablet and mobile devices. The importance of creating a customised user experience for a range of devices should now be a vital part of any website. This is where responsive web design comes in to play.
The fundamental part of responsive web design is ensuring you have provided your user with all they need from your website whatever device they are using. Since different types of devices have screens of various sizes it is necessary to adapt the layout of the website to accomodate the user.
How Do We Make a Website Reponsive?
By creating various break-points we can instruct the web page to load load in a specific way, depending on the width of a screen. Try resizing this window, making it thinner. Watch how the layout adapts to the width of the window. When the screen gets smaller, the responsive web design addresses another common problem caused by handheld displays: navigation.
Navigation on Mobile Layouts
The navigation menu is one of the vital parts of the user experience, no matter what the device. So it’s no suprise that it is important to adapt the nav menu to suit the device.
A common solution to this problem is my making the menu disappear. Sounds daft, I know but in its place, we simply deploy a button which the user can touch to expose the menu. This keeps the website navigable, the design pretty and allows the user to see the information they want immediately after landing on the page.
So what does responsive web design cost?
Any web designer worth their title should have systems in place to be able to offer this at an affordable rate. It does, however, require additional programming and creating styling rules for up to 7 different screen sizes and can turn out to be alot of work.
All websites produced by Distynct as of November 2013 include responive web design.