Page 325 - Xara Web Designer Premium

Responsive web design 325

Responsive web design

About RWD

With the increasing use of mobile devices for internet access there is an increasing
demand for website design tailored to mobile and tablet screen formats.
Although modern mobile devices such as phones have excellent web browsers able to
view any website, a mobile-optimized website should not require zooming to view the
text. So typically this means the main content would be a single column, in a larger point
size to be readable at a glance on a phone. Mobile websites often have reduced content,
and are navigable with single finger operation to scroll and navigate.
While you could create two separate websites, one designed for narrow screen mobile,
another for traditional wider desktop screens, replicating the content across two separate
websites would be tedious and time consuming, especially if you had to do this every
time you updated the text or images.
So Responsive Web Design is a technique that means your websites respond
dynamically to the screen size. Instead of having two separate websites, that is two
separate HTML pages, you instead have one web page that can vary its layout,
depending on screen size (and resolution) of the device being used to view the website.

Two variants of the same website. the first is how it looks on a wide screen display, the second
is for narrow screens such as mobile devices. The text column is narrower, and the pictures
and page elements re-arranged to suit a narrow screen.