A Responsive website is one that seamlessly retains its features and functions when accessed from different types of devices with varying screen sizes. It does so by automatically optimizing its content according to the screen size it’s being opened on.
It means that a responsive website will be as easy and delightful to use on a smartphone as it will be on a full-sized laptop. Each one of you must have been to a website that was just terrible to use on your smartphone. There could’ve been numerous reasons. You couldn’t view the whole page on your screen as it didn’t fit the screen size. Or you couldn’t select an option or even navigate through the website because the icons and text were too small, etc. Personally, going through such an experience makes me absolutely frustrated and gets me all worked up. It’s surprising because 2 billion people (51% of the global-base) across the globe using only their smartphone to access the internet. This number is projected to rise to 75% by 2025.
These stats signify the importance and need for responsive websites in today’s date. So if you are planning on creating a website or are just here to learn about responsive websites and/or website design in general, you know by now why responsive websites are important. So read on to know what you need to know about responsive websites.
How is a website created?
A website is created in one of the following ways — you can either go with one of the web publishing software that provides a variety of pre-designed website templates to choose from (basically, ready-made websites) or, you can create your own website from scratch by writing an HTML code. While the former provides you with a choice of layout templates to choose from based on your judgment of your website’s look and functional requirements, the latter allows you to design your website precisely as you like.
Now, if you find yourself wondering how responsive websites are built or what distinguishes a responsive website from a regular one; know that all websites are created through HTML. There is no real alternative to HTML for making a website. Further, there are certain steps after writing an HTML code, in the process of building a responsive website.
What is HTML?
HTML: Contrary to popular belief, Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is not a programming language. It is the standard markup language used for documents that are created to be displayed in a web browser. HTML is used to define the basic structure of a website using HTML through a code written in HTML.
It is used by web browsers to interpret and compose text, images, and other material into visual or audible features on web pages. Thus, it can be said that HTML allows you to create the basic framework of a website, and an HTML code entails information regarding the website like the positioning of different elements of a website such as headings, paragraphs, images, paragraphs, background colors, etc.
As HTML is used to assign content to a web page, it is CSS that helps you define how that content will be displayed and presented on the browser.
CSS
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. It is a cornerstone technology in the world wide web alongside, of course, HTML & JavaScript. It is nothing but a specified set of instructions that describe the look of content on a website. CSS can style almost any tag in HTML that will be displayed by the browser. With CSS you can control how a website looks on different screen sizes. With CSS, you can control the color, font, the size of text, the spacing between elements, how elements are positioned and laid out, what background images or background colors to be used, different displays for different devices and screen sizes, and much more!
The extent of styling and designing you can perform on a simple HTML website layout is astonishing. Its functionality ranges from selecting background colors, placing borders, choosing typefaces, to placing animations, 2D & 3D transforms, counters, etc. on your web page.
Responsive web design is also one of the many features of CSS. The intricate details of responsive web designing being vastly expansive, let us stick to 4 basic yet essential aspects of CSS that come into play while building a responsive website. There are 4 such aspects:
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Content optimization
Content optimization pertains to choosing a certainly suitable design-language for smaller devices like smartphones. This also concerns bigger screens. The elements like typography, text & image arrangement, color schemes, etc display different characteristics and render varying legibility with changing screen sizes and screen types as well. The text arrangement or layout and its font that you see on a computer screen would not necessarily look as great or as legible as it does on a much smaller smartphone screen.
Since differently sized devices use different display technologies, the same goes for using in website design. Some color combinations that may look pleasant on a computer’s relatively lower-resolution LCD panel, might end up destroying the legibility of your website when viewed on a smartphone’s higher-resolution AMOLED display.
Similarly, text and media arrangement/layout on a web page according to variable viewport sizes is necessary. A poorly laid out website looks as if it has gone completely haywire with text and images not fitting properly on the web page, different elements overlapping with each other, and thus hindering clickability and so on.
All this immediately establishes a negative image of your brand in the eyes of your audience.
While some basic optimizations like the variable re-sizing and re-scaling of objects on the web page are done through HTML while writing the code for the web page itself, some other optimizations are made possible by CSS, such as color rendering options, margins, the adaptive orientation of objects, etc.
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Media queries
Media queries are a cornerstone technology in responsive web design. This is the most important feature of CSS, which allows website designers to render variable styles for the same content, based on different conditions like different screen sizes, different devices, etc.
Through media queries, contents, or media on a website can be displayed in different styles for different conditions. These conditions, as enabled by the latest versions of CSS, encapsulate parameters such as screen size, device size, orientation, and resolution of the screen. The inclusion of Media queries in the CSS firmware was a really big cornerstone for responsive web design as it really took into consideration the increasing variety of devices and users that are subject to website design in their day-to-day lives.
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Web page Layout
The layout of a responsive website’s pages is obviously different from that of a static website. Responsive website layouts use flexible grids instead of fixed columns and widths. A flexible grid layout allows you to change the layout of the web page with changing screen sizes by letting you set breakpoints. Breakpoints are set in the px unit (1 pixel = 1 px). For example, if the width of a screen in terms of pixels is smaller than 480 px, then a web page designed originally for a desktop will not look good on that screen. So, you can set a breakpoint at 480 px and the website will change its layout when it’s being viewed on that small screen.
To develop the layout for a responsive website, modern layout techniques are used that offer responsiveness in websites by default. The most popular of them are Multi-column layout, Flexbox, and CSS grid layout. All these techniques, however being different in their execution, operate on relative widths, grids, and percentages. Thus, websites can respond to any display-size smoothly.
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The Viewport meta tag
The Viewport is the portion of a web page that is visible to the user. In earlier times, websites were designed for desktop computers only. With the advent of smartphones and mobile browsers, those same websites just did not look good as they wouldn’t scale themselves according to the screen sizes. Thus, the mobile browsers just abruptly scaled the entire web pages down on the smartphone screen. So, the users had to zoom in and scroll both vertically and horizontally to view the website. That did not make for a good experience. Basically, mobile browsers did not give the correct information regarding the smartphone’s viewport width.
The Viewport meta tag enables you to instruct the mobile browsers on how to display the web page correctly with the right viewport width. This is done by setting the width of the page so as to follow the screen-width of the device.
The important detail here is that, the media queries and the breakpoints that you included in your design, only work as intended when the web page rightly fits the screen-width. Thus, including the viewport meta tag is essential for making a truly responsive website.
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CSS Frameworks
A CSS framework is a pre-established set of concepts, programs, and functions composed in HTML and CSS that can be used to make a responsive website without having to start from scratch.
CSS frameworks provide you with preset web page layouts, templates, and even overall designs to help make the web designing process much more easy and convenient than it originally is. Through a CSS framework, you can build your own responsive website by adding, changing, or removing elements, content, and other customizable design elements on a preset web page layout or a preset design template.
Thus, a responsive website can also be made using such CSS frameworks.
One of the most widely used CSS frameworks is Bootstrap.
Bootstrap
- Bootstrap is HTML, CSS, and JavaScript open-source framework.
- Using bootstrap you can create responsive, mobile-first web sites or web applications
Note:
- IF you have enough knowledge and experience in HTML then only you can use the Bootstrap framework.
- Bootstrap does not require media queries. It’s automatic.