Implementing Responsive Design for Mobile Devices

Responsive design is becoming pretty familiar these days. The current revolution created in mobile-web development is the way of developing websites compatible to both PC / laptop devices and for the latest generation tablets and mobile users. However, it is widely recommended to develop individual sites to mobiles or tablets with separate web addresses or use a device that detects the target devices and redirect the users to a device specific site. There are two subjects those maters with these suggestions.

Issue occurs with device identification script while tracking the huge number of mobile devices which are continuously hitting the market every day. It might be time consuming and expensive to develop and maintain so many numbers of tablets and mobile oriented sites when compared to the normal sites.

Responsive design aids with a relatively better solution for the breakdown of the web devices. The utmost significant target is to produce a chain of scalable designs projected towards the specific group of devices by making use of scaling images and flexible grids. Most of the web browsers provide data with a maximum number of pixel width, which they support with the help of a CSS element termed as media query. This rate allows us to assume about the target devices since the maximum size of the width will be almost the size of the screen on the device.

In spite of developing diverse websites with different contents, it is wiser to develop a responsive site that can adjust and scale the layers to provide a best feel within the screen space available. It is not needed that responsive design should be taken into consideration for every new website designing a project. Thought this is merely impossible for all projects because of the factors like budget, technical expertise, target audience and time, it can be considered to some extend while planning about web designing.

Media Query

Media query value is limited to various types of devices like laptop, desktop, tablet and smart phone. This value is termed as break points and once the threshold of breaking point is crossed, a further set of CSS codes will be activated to design the webpage in correspondence with fluid layout, images, text format and navigation design focusing these devices. As implementation of responsive design is pretty new to the industry, there is no set of breakpoints widespread all throughout.

Having fixed the media query range and breakpoints, next you got to fix the width of the design. For width of the content, it is likely to set the lower end value. Anyway, with a mobile portrait design, the value is defaultly set at 310 and it represents the normal minimum width used for smartphones. Under such cases, the design can be fitted both upward and downwards based upon the requirements.

Idea Formulation

Most of the mobile projects related to responsive design are formulated on the same idea. With mobile web responsive design, there is an added benefit where you can add break points anytime when you want to adjust extra large screens without designing the site again and again. Responsive design is all about designing websites only to a particular screen size. Designers are with graphic designing background are good on working with limited width mediums like ads, billboards, filters and much more.

The only thing designers need to take into account is the idea on how the sites will appear on diverse widths in order to make the responsive sites the perfect one. They should also think on the way how navigation needs to be adjusted. Designers should also realize that it is quite harder to control the design perspectives and adopt the new flexibility. Once the responsive design turns out to be a successful one, it is possible to design great websites with consistent usage in all types of devices.

Responsive Web Design & CMS

Being a new concept growing hastily all over the world, responsive design happens to be a question with content management systems and other platform oriented systems. Though these discussions commonly arise from the angle of front end, on the other hand there are evidences of a large number of websites create with a strong back end CMS. There are a couple of CMSs which have got a finer grip over the presentation layers when compared to the other.
Like other advanced technologies, responsive design also is not available free from few drawbacks. Some of the features used in an ideal responsive design are not supported by Internet explorer 6 and 7. This doesn’t mean that the design will not be visible in older browsers. The design might look or function in a different way than it looks in newer browsers. Experts suggest that designers should have a clear study on the web analytics data to check the percentage of their target audience, prior to begin designing.

Content Vs Screen size

Making use of an extremely popular screen size as a reference is an outdated methodology which is no more used with the modernization of devices. The ultimate way of responsive design is now-a-days emphasizing greatly on content rather on screen size and context. Media queries are capable of downloading all the contents even if it is not seen on screen. The download speed of responsive sites is reduced as a result to this. Hence, it is important to prefer a site that is supportable to all sorts of devices. With this, it is easier to use mobile website template, with which it becomes convenient to adapt conventional websites for mobiles and other devices.