Why The World Needs Responsive Design

You’ve heard those movie trailers that start with “In a world, …” Well, if we were promoting a movie about website design in 2011 and beyond, it might start with this sentence: In a world where every web-browser has a mind of its own and every other screen is a completely different dimension, it’s clear the world needs responsive design more than ever before.

And, it’s true. The world really does need it. But, “what is responsive design?” you might ask. Well, it’s pretty much what it sounds like: design that responds to multiple browser dimensions and environments. Let’s say your browser is 1280 pixels wide. If you design your site for this width, how will it look on a mobile device that has a width of 240 pixels? Before responsive design, you really didn’t have much control over the look of your site in varying environments and platforms. Sure, you could build a complete mobile website or create a small mobile app version of your site. But, what if you could have just one website that responded to all dimensions?

Responsive design enables the designer to create design concept that will adjust to the various widths available to today’s web browsers. This effect is achieved by using percentages for widths and by using context aware image sizing. Basically, by adding certain relevant code to your .htaccess file, you can get images to load to a certain size depending on the existing browser dimensions. This means, you don’t create an initial size for your image. The code will determine what size the image needs to load to. This approach opens up multiple possibilities for developers.

Going forward, I can totally see the majority of websites out there feature some form of responsive design. And, as I begin to design more often for the mobile user, I’m realizing that there is no better way to deliver great looking web content than by using responsive design.

Filed under: Design
Written by: Brian Jardine
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