Responsive Design - an introduction
Responsive design is flexible, device-independent design for the web – an increasingly important service given that by 2013, mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common web access device worldwide*.
Smart phone and tablet browsing is expanding rapidly. Yet, most websites look and work poorly on these new devices because they were designed to be experienced on a desktop computer with a mouse.
Responsive design makes your website look and work perfectly across new devices, removing the need to create and maintain parallel mobile websites.
Instead, the same website is served up but uses ‘media queries’ to intelligently adapt the page’s layout to the device it’s being displayed on.
Stats from May 2011 show that Blackberry is the most popular device for mobile web browsing followed by iPhone/iPod Touch and then Android some way back in third.
As a start, we would advise targeting the following platforms:
- Smartphone/iPhone3 – 320px wide
- Smartphone/iPhone4 – 640px wide
- Tablet/iPad – 768px wide
- Desktop – 1024px wide
“The beauty of responsive web design becomes obvious when you see your one site accessible in smart phones, tablets, and widescreen desktop browsers. Our clients who adopt responsive design now will also achieve a competitive advantage by offering their customers a superior integrated site experience on the platform of their choice.”
Colin Summers, Front end Designer and Developer
[*Gartner Research – key predictions, 2010]
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