The way people interact on the web has fundamentally changed in the last few years. The emergence of all the new technologies, HTML5, CSS3, the developments of tablets, and the explosive growth of smartphones, is the major reason behind it. To provide a great web experience on a wide variety of mobile devices and laptops has become a challenge for all the developers. For many websites, creating a mobile website version for new devices and resolutions is almost impractical. So how to cater to this challenge that almost all businesses are facing? This is where responsive design, comes in play.

What is Responsive Design?

Responsive web design is a way of making a single website that works effectively on both desktop browsers and the myriad of mobile devices in the market. The responsive design lets you enjoy the best quality browsing experience whether on a smartphone, tablet, netbook, laptop or e-reader and regardless of the operating system. The practice consists of a mix of flexible grids and layouts, images and an intelligent use of CSS media queries.

Rishi Khanna, founder and CEO, ISHIR, precisely defines responsive design and says, “It’s a way of designing and coding websites that detects the user’s screen size and changes the layout accordingly. Responsive design is truly a solution to a lot of design problems caused by the proliferation of new types of mobile devices.”

Why is Responsive Design Inevitable?

There is a huge importance of responsive design in today’s high-tech world, especially when people have started adapting smartphones and tablets at a much greater pace now. There is no doubt that mobile is making steady gains in global market share, and is expected to overtake desktop surfing sometime in late 2013.

Since mobiles typically have small screens, tablets medium and desktops large, responsive design helps you to change the visual style of the website according to different screen sizes. This means that a single website will work perfectly on desktop, mobile devices, tablets and any other platform. 

Benefits of Responsive Design

To see from a user perspective, a website made using responsive design provides high quality and custom user experience. This is because; the sites that are not optimized for mobile devices often display the content that is too small to read.

However, from a website owner’s perspective, responsive design is beneficial as you do not need to build a web version, a mobile version and a tablet version separately for one site. This saves both time and money.

Thus, it would be quite apt to mention that responsive design is the new tide and is here to stay. Responsive design lets us create websites that are future-ready right now.