The days of designing a website for a single desktop screen are well and truly over. Creativemarket duotone lightroom presets vol 1 download free. Technology and the expansion of mobile websites are pushing web designers to rethink how their work is displayed across various devices.
What is responsive website design?
Responsive website design is an approach that allows design and code to respond to the size of a device’s screen. Fasttasks 2 47 – the troubleshooting appliance. Meaning it gives you the optimal viewing experience no matter what device you are using. The best responsive websites essentially utilise fluid grids, flexible images and CSS styling to alter the site’s design and render it according to the width of the browser. For designers, the ultimate goal should be to seamlessly tailor the UI and UX of a website design across different devices and platforms.
Optimising your website to adjust to different viewing methods – intuitively and automatically – is a commercial necessity. This guide explores four basics of responsive website design to keep your engagement and lead conversion buoyant.
The internet is growing every second, millions of people browse websites on mobile devices more than desktops. It is now time to get started to build Responsive Web Design, which is fast fluent and clean. In this course you will learn the most advanced techniques to Build Responsive Web Sites which are mobile friendly.You will learn how to improve the website performance with CSS frameworks.
Why is responsive design so important?
Responsive Web Design Principles
If we designed and developed countless versions of a website that worked for every known device out there, the process just wouldn’t be practical timewise and it would be extremely costly! It would also render sites ineffective to future technology changes and make them nearly impossible to maintain. Responsive design is an effective solution to futureproof your website.
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A major key to responsive web design is knowing your audience and what device they’re using to view your website. How much of your current traffic is desktop vs tablet vs mobile?
It’s critical to design your website for varying devices, but it get’s more complicated when designing across varying web browsers. Each major web browser has it’s own mobile version and renders sites differently. Where it gets even trickier is that there are many versions of browsers that need to be catered for—you can’t expect everybody to be on the latest version. So it’s important that the design works and responds to a variety of browser versions.
What website dimensions should I design for?
There is no “standard website size.” There are hundreds of devices out there, and model sizes and screen resolutions change all the time. And each individual website attracts users on different devices. You can find out what browsers and web page sizes are most popular for your site by looking at Google Analytics. So with endless combinations of browser sizes and devices, how on earth do you design responsively without losing your mind?
Try designing at least 3 layouts
A responsive website design should have at least 3 layouts for different browser widths.
Small: under 600 px. This is how content will look on most phones.
Medium: 600 px – 900 px. This is how content will look on most tablets, some large phones and small netbook-type computers.
Large: over 900 px. This is how content will look on most personal computers.
Each of these layouts should include the same text and graphical elements, but each should be designed to best display that content based on the user’s device. Scaling down the page to fit on smaller screen sizes will make the content unreadable, but if you scale the content relative to one another and switch to one column, then it makes it much more easier to read.
Things to think about
User experience is key: Responsive design needs to be more than converting a desktop site into a mobile screen. You need to consider the user’s experience, their interaction and the essential content they’re actually looking for while using a mobile device.
Don’t design for the latest mobile device with a specific screen dimension. Instead, design your site around your content. How will the layout and elements work on desktop and how will those same elements adapt to each other on a mobile device?
Engagement: The hierarchy of the layout is super important, especially on mobile. Often less is more! The mobile experience compared to desktop is much more focused with a limited amount space, so the way users read and move through your site needs to be really clear to get across your key message and understand what the site is all about. Also think about the main action of the page. If the key goal is to get people clicking a ‘Contact Us’ button, then don’t hide it down the page underneath slabs of text. Tailor your content and design around that experience.
Flexible images are really important to designing a responsive website. You need to think about how an image will scale. How will it look on a large desktop screen vs a tablet vs a small mobile screen? From a development perspective, the code will allow images to scale via a percentage value to the width of the browser window.
Navigation is important on mobile. There are several common methods for collating large menus and content. It could be in the familiar hamburger style menu, a simple drop-down selection, expand/collapse fields or you could use tabs that scroll horizontally.
Gestures open up new possibilities for design. People love reading with their hands and interacting with the content—it empowers the user. On mobiles and tablets, users can pinch to zoom or slide images across the screen. Interaction greatly affects the design. For instance, if you have an image gallery try avoid using a standard carousel (small dots) to let people cycle through each image. Think about the size of a person’s finger and how that translates into a useful UI solution. Complex desktop designs need to be able to adapt to simple intuitive UI for a small mobile screen. Always keep this in mind when designing for different devices. The design has to be flexible so it creates a great experience across all devices for users.
Tools and resources
Your web browser might seem like an obvious tool to use, but it’s the most effective resource to preview your designs on the web. Install a few different browsers to get a good range of feedback. Then start resizing the browser windows.
Your mobile device is another obvious tool to use but really helpful to preview your designs on because it shows you exactly what your website will look like under those specific conditions.
Fluid grids are based on designing a website layout on percentage values instead of set pixels. For instance the width of content on a desktop screen could be 930px, but you want to target the design down to 320px on mobile. To convert this into a scalable figure, the result works out to be 320/930 = 34.4%. When you apply this to the mobile screen size the elements in the design layout will resize in relation to one another.
Google’s resizer is a good resource to quickly preview your site on multiple devices.
Media queries is a type of code that will get implemented into your site when it get’s built. It’s important to have in your code because it sets the conditions for the design to magically adapt to the size of the screen.
Source: 99 Designs
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Responsive Web Design Fundamentals is a hands-on, code-intensive course on how to build high-performance, responsive websites that look great across multiple screen sizes and devices.
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Responsive Web Design Fundamentals Templates
Responsive Web Design Fundamentals
This course is an introduction to responsive web design strategies and how to implement those strategies through HTML, CSS and JavaScript. You'll learn how responsive thinking affects content writing and structure as well as your design and development workflow. You'll also explore best practices for responsive typography and images, creative tips to improve the visuals of your designs and how to identify and improve site performance across mobile and desktop.
Course Outline
Lesson 1: Setting the Stage
You'll start by looking at the objectives and structure of the course and what you'll be learning. Then you'll begin to explore the technical, conceptual, and design considerations involved with Responsive Web Design. Concepts covered include understanding how mobile web browsing influences our design and development, why design patterns are becoming increasingly important and how to identify challenges when responsively designing for content management systems.
Lesson 2: Basic Mechanics and Leveling Up
In this lesson, you'll dive into the core concepts of fluid layouts, flexible media, and CSS media queries. You'll learn strategies for converting a static layout into a flexible layout, how to best use media query breakpoints to make layouts look great, and when to use the right unit of measure for the job (pixels versus percentages versus ems). You'll also get a chance to learn about new units of measure that are gaining traction on the web and decide whether they make sense for your upcoming projects.
Lesson 3: Typography and Layout
You'll learn best practices for adding web fonts to your projects. In the typography section, you'll learn how to effectively use web fonts to improve the readability and aesthetics of your design.In addition you'll learn the latest methods of how to mitigate the performance hit your users face when loading fonts. In the layout section, you'll implement enhancements to your design using CSS Columns and Flexbox. You'll also get a preview of CSS Grid Layout, a new technology with the potential to revolutionize the way we design for the web.
Lesson 4: Navigation Patterns
This lesson focuses on how to determine the appropriate context for responsive navigation and how to tailor your user interface for touch screens as well as for smartphones versus desktop. You'll take a tour of a number of desktop and mobile navigation patterns and learn the pros and cons of each. Finally, you'll walk through a detailed tutorial on how to build an 'off-canvas' navigation that works well on mobile and translates effectively to desktop screens.
Lesson 5: Advanced Enhancement
Discover how to integrate responsive images into your websites through a series of hands-on exercises using the picture element and other techniques. You'll acknowledge the past by looking at how to support older browsers with polyfills and look toward the future with a discussion of the potential of Element Queries.
Lesson 6: Performance
Learn why website performance is one of the most important elements of the design process, especially for users in mobile and/or low-bandwidth scenarios. You'll learn which tools are useful for testing your sites and walk through a number of exercises involving the optimization of our sample site. Specifically, you'll learn when a Content Delivery Network (CDN) makes sense. You'll also learn recent techniques involving inline CSS and JavaScript configurations that can cut page-load time dramatically for your users.
Prerequisites
Familiarity with the concepts covered in our Modern Web Design course (or the equivalent).
Basic understanding of how to use browser developer tools.
Responsive Web Design Fundamentals Tutorial
Requirements
Responsive Web Design
Mac or Windows desktop or laptop
Permissions to download lesson files from Github
A text editor built for HTML/CSS (We suggest Atom, it’s free, and available for Mac, Windows, and Linux)