Responsive web design (RWD) is an approach to website design which aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing and interaction experience such as easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, censuring & scrolling. Across a broad range of various devices i.e. from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones. A site which is designed with responsive website design adapts the layout by using fluid proportion based grids, flexible images, CSS media queries, etc to the environment.
1.)Here the Fluid Grid concept calls for page element sizing in relative units such as percentage rather than absolute units like pixels or points.
2.)Flexible Images are sized in relative units as because it prevent them from displaying outside their contained element.
3.)Media Queries allow the page to use various rules of CSS style based on characteristics of the device, the site which is being displayed on i.e. Most commonly the width of the browser.
Now website design company responsive layouts are very popular due to the significant trend towards much uses of tablets, mobile phones, notebook, etc for viewing websites. Responsive website design is becoming so important day by day such that it has the net effect of penalizing sites that are not mobile friendly. Some of the related concepts like RWD such as mobile first, unobtrusive javascript and progressive enhancement used to exist before the occurrence of RWD. Some of the alternatives to responsive web design are: pinch and zoom, mobile-first designed, mobile-alternative websites, mobile-apps, etc.
It is known that Luke Wroblewski after summarizing some of the RWD and mobile design challenges, he created a catalogue that consists of multi-device layout patterns, which is widely used by the web design company. He Suggested that compared to a simple RWD approach, a device experience or RESS (i.e. Responsive web design plus server side components) approaches can provide a user experience that is more effective for mainly mobile phones or similar devices. Server-side dynamic CSS processing of style sheet languages like SASS or MML can be a portion of such an approach by retrieving a server based API which controls the device (typically a mobile handset) differences in conjunction with a device capabilities database, so in order to improve the ease of use and learn ability. RESS Is much expensive to develop and it requires more than just client-side logic. Thus It tends to be reserved for organizations having larger budgets. Hence Google recommends the responsive design for smart phone websites over other approaches.
Coming to the history – The first site that feature a layout which adapted to the browser viewport extent is ‘audi.com’. This Was launched in late 2001 and was created by a team at razorfish consists of Jürgen Spangl and Jim Kalbach (of information architecture), Ken Olling (of design), and Jan Hoffmann (of interface development). Here the limited browser capacity meant for internet explorer where the layout could adapt dynamically in the browser whereas for Netscape the page was needed to be reloaded from the server when its being resized. Again Cameron Adams created a demonstration(in the year-2004) which can still be found online in the site. By 2008, a number of related terms – like ‘flexible’, ‘liquid’,’elastic’ and ‘fluid’ were being used to describe the layouts. The CSS3 media queries were almost ready and completed for prime time in late 2008 (i.e. Early 2009). Ethan Marcotte first coined the term responsive web design(RWD) and described it to refer fluid grid or flexible images or media queries, in a May, 2010 article in ‘a list apart’.
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