What is RWD and why do we need it?

RWD, Responsive Web Design, technically speaking is “an approach to web design in which a site is crafted to provide an optimal viewing experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices”. It is all about fitting the same website across all the mediums. Ethan Marcotte first mentioned this approach in his article on Responsive website design rochester. He discussed various techniques and ways to attain this kind of approach. He laid special emphasis on the practice of using Internet on mobile devices and how the technological advancement will only increase it. Thus, it becomes important that our websites should be responsive to all the mediums it’s used on. The three technical ingredients for responsive web design are:-

a.Fluid Grids: Normally, the websites are built on fixed width layouts. In between using liquid layout was even practiced but never became really popular. Fluid Grids came as a step ahead of liquid layout. With this the layout elements will adjust their width with respect to each other irrespective of the medium it’s used in. Though Fluid Grids have solved the problem of resizing the website but still there are certain limitations to it and its here that Media Queries come in. b.Media Queries CSS3 media queries are almost compatible on all the browsers. These are used to gather data about the site visitor and then use it to conditionally apply CSS styles on the websites.

c.Flexible Images: They don't have fixed width and resize the image according to the medium used by the user. The need for this kind of approach has arisen due to extensive usage of mobile devices. Gone are the days when using Internet was a practice on PC’s. With Tablets, Smart phones coming into action it has become a necessity to have Responsive Web Design approach for our websites. It is a change that been readily adopted in the web world. And if we look at the demands of the mobile devices (tablets, smartphones) in 2013, this year seems to be the perfect year for RWD. Websurge, based in Upstate Rochester, NY, is the premier development company for offering top-notch quality services in e-marketing, e-development, e-automation, wordpress rochester and e-hosting.