To make things more complicated, some devices have high resolution screens that need larger images than you might expect to display nicely. This is essentially the same problem, but in a slightly different context. Trent Walton, a jack-of-two-trades designer, and programmer actually created a website whose layout barely changes at all. The only differences seen are multiple to single column shifts on the info and search pages.
- If you’re new to web design, development, or blogging, you might wonder why responsive design matters in the first place.
- In addition to this, WordPress.com sites also serve images using Jetpack’s Photon Content Delivery Network (CDN).
- In general, the smooth navigation and easy to find social buttons make sharing articles by Wired a breeze.
- By then, the original image would already have been loaded, and you would load the small image as well, which is even worse in responsive image terms.
- When people access your website on their phone, you want users to be able to find what they need quickly, whether that’s locating a product or finding an answer.
Responsive web design offers cross-browser compatibility and ensures that your website will accommodate visitors regardless of the type or size of their device. A responsive web page should look good on large desktop screens and on small mobile phones. For this active learning, we’re expecting you to be brave and do it alone, mostly. We want how to design website you to implement your own suitable art-directed narrow screen/wide screenshot using , and a resolution switching example that uses srcset. One impressive aspect of this responsive website example is that it shows how even the most intricate design patterns, when paired with attention to detail can work when designing for mobile-first.
Responsive web design examples
This method allows images to resize according to the screen size without losing quality or breaking the layout. An improvement would be to display a cropped version of the image which displays the important details of the image when the site is viewed on a narrow screen. A second cropped image could be displayed for a medium-width screen device, like a tablet.
Media queries work best with a “mobile first” approach where you define what you want on mobile and then scale up from there. You’ll need to test content to see where breakpoints occur and plan them. Eventually, you may find you can predict breakpoints based on a device’s screen resolution. Organizations and designers found the benefits of responsive design hard to ignore. Rather than work with absolute units (e.g., pixels) on separate versions, designers focused on just one design and let it flow like a liquid to fill all “containers.”
CSS Examples
The sections of the site are divided using a visually pleasing dynamic moving text, bringing back the kitsch Marquee design of the 90s. On the small-screen version, this is taken down a notch so as not to overcrowd the screen. The “Topics” button changes to a “Menu” button as a solution to condensing the breadcrumb elements and kills two birds by leading into the “Topics” section. Design website Smashing Magazine screams out loudly in red – it’s a minestrone of fun, clickable elements and content. They make great use of the background hero photo, something that’s generally make or break. It’s high definition, bold and loud, like the fashion it’s trying to convey and works perfectly when scaled down to a smaller resolution.
VML Digital Marketing and Advertising Agency’s responsive website goes from a three-column layout to a single column once it gets scaled down to smaller resolutions. Even the hamburger menu remains the same as the desktop version, like in the example above with Rally Interactive. Hiding the menu options behind a hamburger on the desktop version doesn’t always make sense, depending on your website’s business and usability goals. Many UXers maintain that the extra screen real estate should be used to display these options, which leads to improved discoverability. For example, while customer logos are presented in a three-column layout on desktop and laptop computers, they’re shown in a single-column layout on handheld devices.
You’ll want to take the responsiveness into account right from the beginning, even when you’re just creating the website wireframe of the product. Both responsive design and fluid design tend to be used interchangeably when talking about mobile-first design, but the truth is, they aren’t the same. As we mentioned above, responsive design uses fixed units of pixels to define the breakpoints at which the content of the UI adapts to scale upwards or downwards.
In this case, sizes is not needed — the browser works out what resolution the display is that it is being shown on, and serves the most appropriate image referenced in the srcset. In this section, we’ll look at the two problems illustrated above and show how to solve them using HTML’s responsive image features. CSS arguably has better tools for responsive design than HTML, and we’ll talk about those in a future CSS module. However, issues arise when you start to view the site on a narrow screen device. The header below looks OK, but it’s starting to take up a lot of the screen height for a mobile device. And at this size, it is difficult to see faces of the two people within the first content image.
Here are the most common screen resolutions across mobile, tablet, and desktop users worldwide. Businesses without a mobile website are falling behind at an alarming rate, because 8 in 10 visitors will stop engaging with a website that doesn’t display well on their device. It’s way too easy for users to hit the back button and try a rival business instead, and Google even https://deveducation.com/ ranks websites that don’t use mobile responsive design lower in their search. This means that once you’re done adding all your CSS elements and code to your website, you don’t have to worry about them making your website not responsive for mobile users. In addition to this, WordPress.com sites also serve images using Jetpack’s Photon Content Delivery Network (CDN).
But you should also consider pushing yourself to prioritize mobile even further so that it lies at the very core of your design. Desktop isn’t going away anytime soon, but it’s no longer the standard, either. Google not only rewards websites that are optimized for mobile; it also boosts the SEO of sites with faster page load speeds.
