Smashing Tips

Information Technology and Telecommunication have progressed at a rapid rate in the recent years. The development of smartphones, tablet PCs, notebooks and touch screen enabled android mobile devices in the last decade or so is a testament of how quickly technology has evolved. The invention of these multiple computing platforms has urged website developers to design adaptable websites that can be viewed easily on any of the newly developed gadgets that are being used by more people nowadays than PCs and Laptops. For developing an adaptable website, it is absolutely necessary that it should have a responsive web design.
Now that Google has started giving importance to the responsiveness of websites in deciding page rankings on SERPs, it has become ever so important that websites are made more responsive and adaptable. Here are some handy tips that can help budding web developers in learning the art of responsive web designing.

Making use of a template is the first bit of advice that any expert in responsive web design would give you. Templates make it much easier for designers who are learning the tricks and trade of this type of web designing. Not only does using a template save time, it also provides a web developer with lots of fresh ideas. There are many websites on the internet that are providing intuitive responsive web design templates that can be used for making responsive websites with ease.

The second tip for responsive web designing is to work with layouts that are fluid in nature. Because your website design would have to adjust to the different screen resolutions of the mobile devices, iPads and notebooks, it must have a layout that can adapt and fit according to the devices on which it is being viewed by the user. Defining the widths in percentages rather than in pixels can also help you in coming up with a responsive web design.

jQuery is one of the most useful tools in designing responsive websites. This tool provides you the chance to play with several plug-ins that can help in enhancing the responsiveness and adaptability of your website design. Some of the most popular plug-ins that jQuery can provide you are, Supersized, FitVids, FitText and Elastislide. Thus, the third tip is to make use of anyone or all these plug-ins for making your website more responsive.

The employment of scalable background images is another of the tips that should be remembered by web developers in designing responsive web designs. It essentially means that you use CSS tweaks or jQuery plug-ins to scale the background image according to the desired resolution of the gadget on which it is supposed to be viewed. This is one tips that needs to be kept in mind for designing good quality responsive websites.

Images are one of the most important parts of any website design. In order to make the images of the website more adaptable to the changing resolution requirements it is advisable to use flexible imagery techniques like context-aware image sizing. The use of this technique will allow you to save multiple sizes of an image. So, now when the image is being viewed on a mobile device, only that image size that fits the resolution of the device is going to be displayed.

When designing responsive websites it is not that necessary to be over-cautious with the layout of the web design for all the devices. This does not mean that you should not design the layout perfectly for the devices that are being used for viewing your website by most of your customers. However, for all those devices that are not that much popular among your customer base, you can afford to have a less than perfect layout.

Remembering and following these tips while developing a responsive web design can help young web designers in making websites that can adapt to any resolution setting and can be viewed on any mobile or touch-screen device.