Why Responsive Web Design is Better Than Ever

For the past few years, responsive design has been the talk of the industry. Many people have predicted that it would be the industry standard. Fast forward to today and you’ll see that they were right. Most design and development firms offer responsive design services and the most reputable websites use this format to cater to their mobile audience. Responsive web design, however, has come a long way and is better than ever. Here are some new developments that will surprise you.

Responsive Images for Web Design

One of the big issues with responsive was that dealing with images was tedious. An image that was created for desktop users would be too big for mobile users and take a long time to load. It was also annoying to try to scale the size to the screen of the devices. Fortunately, there are many tools, plugins, and technology that can help you optimize your image sizes, automatically adjust to the mobile user, and customize how your images appear.

Conditional Loading

Conditional loading is a feature that makes people often think “why didn’t they come up with that earlier?” Rather than loading all the elements of a website at once, it only loads when needed. For example, do you really need to load social media buttons before the user has reached the bottom of the screen to share your content? Conditional loading only loads elements when relevant which makes the whole mobile browsing experience faster and seamless.

Responsive Typography

Typography is very important today for web design, especially in the responsive design era. Typography in design not only makes you stand out from other websites, but also makes your website more consumable by users. The right typography really does make the text pop and draw people into reading the content. With many websites now using custom or unique typography, it’s becoming important to make sure that the text comes out correctly on all devices. Proper optimization is necessary to ensure that your typography makes its impact.

Use of Grids for Layouts

Previously, designers used position and float to create layouts. Now using the responsive grid system is becoming more commonplace and a better choice for developing responsive sites. This system makes it easy to place as many columns on your layout, ensure that your layout scales to the screen size, and run seamlessly with your HTML and CSS code.

Use of Client-Side Device Detection Through an API

There are now services that use an API to get information from users. It will see if the device of the user has a touch screen, check for calling capabilities, calculate bandwidth speeds, detect the browser being used, and so much more. With this information, you can make certain that most of your users are being served the best possible browsing experience on their mobile device.

This is just scratching the surface. There is a lot more being discovered, developed, and optimized for the responsive format. With each passing month, website owners are able to create a better mobile browsing experience for their users.