So, you have heard the term ‘responsive web designing’, so many times but always wondered what it is?

Have you ever browsed a website on your mobile phone where you had to spend a lot of energy and time scrolling horizontally just so you can see the entire web page? Maybe the images were too big and they just didn’t fit into your screen and you had to zoom out just so you could see them?

This must have been so frustrating.

Such a website is what web designers call a “non-responsive website”.

What is a responsive website?

A responsive website is a site that responds well to the device it is being viewed on.

In the early days of the internet, people could access websites only on desktops and laptops. The screens of these devices are quite big. So, when the first websites were developed, they were made to fit the screen sizes of desktops and laptops.

Today, we have other devices through which we can access the internet – tablets, smartphones etc. But their screens are significantly smaller than the screens of desktops and laptops. Imagine if websites that were designed specifically for the larger screens of desktops and laptops were opened on phones and tablets. They wouldn’t fit into these screens would they? This is called non-responsive web design – a website that doesn’t meet the changed dimensional requirements of other devices.

But what if the website automatically scaled down to fit into the smaller screens of phones and tablets? This is what we call a responsive web design – where the website changes according to the device it is being viewed on.

Responsive web designing is a web development approach that creates dynamic changes to the appearance of a website, depending on the screen size and orientation of the device being used to view it. It is one approach to the problem of designing for the multitude of devices available to customers, ranging from small screen mobile phones to large desktop monitors be it square or wide.

So let’s say you’re browsing Facebook on the laptop. Your home page covers the entire screen. Now you access your FB account on your phone – and lo and behold – your entire home page is perfectly visible on your phone, all the images, text and buttons are scaled down, rearranged to fit the small screen, font sizes are automatically adjusted and you don’t need to struggle to view the entire web page. You don’t need to scroll horizontally or zoom out to view your home page.

Because responsive design relies on shuffling elements around the page, design and development need to work closely together to ensure a usable experience across devices. When elements move around the page, the user experience can be completely different from one view of the site to the next. Therefore testing responsive web designing across the platforms is highly recommended.

All companies must strive to make their web design responsive, as it makes the browsing experience very nice for customers.

We at Ashtech practice responsive web designing for all the websites that we design & develop. You can read further about it on this page on our website. And you can also check our work for responsive web designing from the portfolio section of our website.