How does responsive web design work? Advantages,Disadvantages

How does responsive web design work?

Responsive sites use fluid grids. Rather than pixels, all page elements are sized by proportion. So if you have three columns, you would define how wide they should be in relation to the other columns, rather than how wide each should be. Media, as in, images are resized relatively too, this way an image can stay within its column or relative design element.

Advantages of using responsive web design

In an ideal situation, all developers would come with extra hands and the extra time necessary to build a separate site, completely optimized for mobile devices. For those of us who aren’t Google or Facebook, we need to find the best way, one without piling on huge amounts of labor, to give users an optimized experience.

• The biggest advantage of using responsive design for developers comes down to how much time and effort you save.
• Responsive design means, for back-end developers, there’s only one version of the site to be updated. All the content could go in the same place, and the entire project becomes a lot simpler.
• For front end developers, the process is almost certainly a better choice than creating multiple stylesheets, although there can be a lot of work involved to make a slick, responsive design. Imagine all of your CSS code in a single place and no need for multiple edits for a single tweak.

Disadvantages of using responsive web design

• It’s debatable whether this is a good reason to avoid responsive design, but as a general point, it is valid. You won’t find any load-time benefit for the user. Even if a user, because they’re using a smartphone, doesn’t see all the site’s elements, it doesn’t mean those elements were not loaded in the background. Fluid images, images which scale to fit the screen size probably pose the biggest issue for load-time. The process of resizing the image files for display on tablet or smartphone, once you download the image files sized for desktops can put pressure on the limited power of mobile devices.
• Some mobile browsers don’t support media queries. This is mostly a temporary problem, regular mobile OS updates and the growing popularity of responsive design is fixing this issue. For the moment, though, it may be something worth considering.

Why do you need to switch to Responsive Web Design?

Check your traffic, most of your visitors must be getting to your website through mobile devices. Responsive web design isn’t meant to be the ultimate savior, protecting you from the ever-changing mobile world. Responsive web design is a concept, which when implemented the right way can improve the user experience, but not completely solve all the problems faced by your users. For that, we’ll need to constantly work with new resolutions, devices, and technologies to continuously improve the user experience as technology keeps evolving.

Besides saving us from a lot of frustration, responsive web design also works for the user. We can build custom solutions for a wider range of users, on a broader range of devices using responsive web design, and every custom solution makes for a better user experience. A website can be tailored for someone on an old laptop or device, as well as it can be tailored for the vast majority of people using the gadgets currently trending, and likewise as much for the handful of users who own the most advanced gadgets today and in the years to come. In this way, responsive web design allows a great custom experience for everyone. As web designers, this is something we always strive to achieve.