Responsive Web Design: What It Is And How To Use It

Developing a whole new website or web application is a challenging process. You won’t know if the site will be successful until it’s live and in the world, so creating a separate mobile site or a mobile app in tandem with a website project could be a big waste time and money. The viewport meta tag will accept individual values as well as multiple values, allowing multiple viewport properties to be set at once. Setting multiple values requires comma separating them within the content attribute value.

The min-width property sets a minimum browser or screen width that a certain set of styles would apply to. If anything is below this limit, the style sheet link or styles will be ignored. Anything above the maximum browser or screen width specified would not apply to the respective media query.

How to create a responsive website

When I build responsive websites, I always start by creating a non-responsive layout, fixed at the default size. You must invest in responsive design as a long-term plan; it is not a fad or passing preference. Your website must adapt to all browsers, regardless of the type of device users use, as screens continue to change.

4Using an integer above 1 will zoom the website to be larger than the default scale. A breakout of mobile first media queries might look at bit like the following. 4Without any media queries the section and aside become quite small. Unfortunately media queries do not work within Internet Explorer 8 and below, as well as other legacy browsers.

Since websites are no longer accessed only through computers, companies need to focus on showcasing responsive web designs. Develop responsive web apps and websites and export your work in the development environment of your choice. To learn more about why responsive web design is important for accessibility, read the WCAG’s success criterion guideline. In this image, you can see that the fixed version of the content has the same width regardless of the device, whereas in the fluid version, the content fills the available screen space of the device. In print, publishers determine the size of what is displayed in absolute measures.

Instead, the content itself should determine how the layout adjusts to its container. In a responsive design, you can use Flexbox to display items as a single row, or wrapped onto multiple rows as the available space decreases. In CSS Grid Layout the fr unit allows the distribution of available space across grid tracks.

The next example creates a grid container with three tracks sized at 1fr. This will create three column tracks, each taking one part of the available space in the container. You can find out more about this approach to create a grid in the Learn Layout Grids topic, under Flexible grids with the fr unit. Several layout methods, including Multiple-column layout, Flexbox, and Grid are responsive by default.

Media queries based on device capability #

With the use of specific examples, it gives you a practical understanding of the concept. Most importantly, it teaches you how to write the necessary code to create custom responsive web layouts. If you are completely new to the concept of responsive web design and don’t want to read lengthy articles, then this video is your best choice. Once you finish the design and development, you should launch your website and test it.

  • Start using modern solutions by implementing responsive navbars and hamburger menus for your website.
  • However, any-hover and any-pointer may be useful if it is important to work out what kind of device a user has.
  • We are sharing a simple CSS code that works on almost all websites.
  • Beyond this, the only thing that changes is the width of the content area and the margin space on the left and right.
  • In addition, devices have different features with which we interact with them.

Once you applied this code to your website, embedded videos are now responsive. As I already said, you’ll probably have to adapt this code a bit to fit the specific needs of your website. Learn more about applying different units to control element width and height.

No matter how large or small the viewport may be the Food Sense website adjust, creating a natural user experience. In this demo, we use media queries to apply different layouts for mobile, tablet and desktop screens (here’s the full page version to make resizing easier). Responsive web design as a concept has been around a long time now; in fact, it’s the de facto way of building websites nowadays.

Mobile First Demo

The practice consists of a mix of flexible grids and layouts, images and an intelligent use of CSS media queries. As the user switches from their laptop to iPad, the website should automatically switch to accommodate for resolution, image size and scripting abilities. One may also have to consider the settings on their devices; if they have a VPN for iOS on their iPad, for example, the website should not block the user’s access to the page. In other words, the website should have the technology to automatically respond to the user’s preferences. This would eliminate the need for a different design and development phase for each new gadget on the market.

When using minimum-scale the value should be a positive integer lower than or equal to the initial-scale. Using the same reasoning, the maximum-scale value should be a positive integer greater than or equal to the initial-scale. Additionally, new devices and resolutions are being released all of the time. Trying to keep up with these changes could be an endless process. These days it is hard to find someone who doesn’t own a mobile device, or multiple, connected to the Internet.

The image in this design automatically resizes after certain “break” points, but in between those width changes, only the side margins and excess white space are altered. On smaller screens and minimized browsers, the navigation simplifies and the columns of navigation at the top fall off. At the design’s smallest version, the navigation simplifies to just a drop-down menu, perfect for saving space without sacrificing critical navigation links.

Part of the Solution: Flexible Everything

Phone users are more comfortable scrolling down a page than using small buttons to interact with the page. We choose to look at 3 screen widths, a desktop, iPad and iPhone. When the horizontal space is fully limited, the navigation is simplified and stacked vertically.This design features a complex layout that looks inspired by a print style. When viewed on a standard wide computer screen, more portfolio pieces are featured and spanned horizontally across the page. As one moves down the page, more graphics and imagery span the space. On a smaller screen, the portfolio piece is cut down to one, and then eventually left out altogether for very small screens and narrow browsers.

Website content responds to these points and adjusts itself to the screen size to display the accurate layout. Our simple grid structure made it easier to plan out our components. On the home page we used a horizontal scroller that had four components that would scroll across on a click. Our tablet layout let us keep this component but just amend it to only show three items, then on our phone width we removed the scrolling functionality completely and instead displayed each item vertically. Each component you design may require different behaviours, so think about how the visitor will want to use the component on different screen sizes.

In the below demo, we have as many cards as will fit on each row, with a minimum size of 200px. CSS Grid Layout allows for the straightforward creation of flexible grids. If we consider the earlier floated example, rather than creating our columns with percentages, we could use grid layout and the fr unit, which represents a portion of the available space in the container. This meta tag exists because when smartphones first arrived, most sites were not mobile optimized. The mobile browser would, therefore, set the viewport width to 980 pixels, render the page at that width, and show the result as a zoomed-out version of the desktop layout. Users could zoom in and pan around the website to view the bits they were interested in, but it looked bad.

HTML Tags List

This happens at each break point when the layout is stressed, but in between the break points, the images just change proportionally in size. This maintains balance in the design, while ensuring that any images don’t get so small that they become unusable. You might want, for example, to place media queries all in one style sheet responsive web design for devices like the iPad. Placing a media query for both the horizontal and vertical orientations of the iPad in the same style sheet file would be far more efficient. One can create multiple style sheets, as well as basic layout alterations defined to fit ranges of widths — even for landscape vs. portrait orientations.

In the logo example above , the ideal situation would be to not crop half of the illustration or to keep the logo from being so small that it becomes illegible and “floats” up. Tutorials, references, and examples are constantly reviewed to avoid errors, but we cannot warrant full correctness of all content. https://globalcloudteam.com/ While using W3Schools, you agree to have read and accepted our terms of use,cookie and privacy policy. There is something trendy and cool called one page web site – everything goes on one single page and the navigation bootstrap menu on top just scrolls the page to the corresponding place.

How to create a responsive website

In this stage, you don’t have to think of a responsive design yet. You can use a website layout template or use a prototyping toolto quickly finish the skeleton of your website. Be careful when choosing what content to hide or show depending on screen size. Don’t simply hide content just because you can’t fit it on the screen.

Create a Responsive Website Online and for Free, in Minutes

There are a number of techniques to resize images proportionately, and many are easily done. The most popular option, noted in Ethan Marcotte’s article on fluid images but first experimented with by Richard Rutter, is to use CSS’s max-width for an easy fix. In this article, you’ll find how to respond to the user’s behavior and environment based on screen size, platform and orientation. In this tutorial, Gary Simon shows you how to create a fully responsive image gallery in the simplest way. Responsive web design is the best way to make your website look great on any mobile device. If you’ve just stepped into the world of web design and you still have no idea what responsive web design is or how to make a responsive web page, you’ve come to the right place.

Create a Single Page Responsive Website Using Bootstrap

Since they depend on the respective website’s layout, we cannot provide you with ready-made codes. Now, since responsive web designs only use HTML and CSS, designers must create them. In fact, it is called a responsive web design when you use CSS and HTML to shrink, hide, resize, enlarge, or move the contact to make it look good on various screens. And, with the tremendous growth in mobile internet usage comes the responsibility of creating websites that fit every possible screen resolution. This is where Responsive web design comes into the picture, the knight in shining armor for every web designer with a client asking for a website for a gazillion different screen resolutions.

HTML Media

This article showcases 20 of the best responsive web design tutorials to get you started. Responsive design is an approach to web design that makes your web content adapt to the different screen and window sizes of a variety of devices. With an internet increasingly accessed from mobile devices, it’s no longer enough to have a static website design that only looks good on a computer screen. Inside the media query for a max-width of 600px, add the CSS which is only for small screens.

Except as otherwise noted, the content of this page is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License, and code samples are licensed under the Apache 2.0 License. Find out more on the MDN pages for hover, any-hover, pointer, any-pointer. If you look at the HTML source of a responsive page, you will usually see the following tag in the of the document. Today, everyone has smartphones with them, constantly communicating and looking for information. In many countries, the number of smartphones has surpassed the number of personal computers; having a mobile-friendly website has become a critical part of having an online presence.

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