Creating a Responsive Design with Cross-Browser Compatibility
The Web is a great place to be. It's full of interesting content, tools, and resources. The downside is that it can sometimes be difficult to navigate and use due to the fact that websites are designed by different people with different backgrounds, browser configurations, and devices they're using. For example, if you're on a laptop and browsing from Australia, you might find that text is not legible because your screen resolution isn't set correctly for where you are located or even what type of device (desktop or mobile) you are using at any given time.
Why is a responsive design important for a website?
A responsive design is an important step forward for a website, as the number of mobile devices in use is increasing. Mobile phones, tablets, and other handheld devices have different screen sizes and capabilities. These devices also have different operating systems, and different bandwidth speeds at which they access the Internet:
Mobile phones may have a small screen size (480px by 640px) or even less (320px by 480px), so every pixel counts when you're designing for mobile devices. Some people still think that "mobile" means "phone," but tablets are also now considered mobile devices since they offer many similar features as laptops do -- plus they're much easier to carry around!
In addition to all this diversity among today's handheld computers, you'll need to consider how users with slower dial-up connections will experience your site or app.
How do you create a responsive design?
So, you want to create a responsive design. Good for you! The web is going mobile, and the sooner we web designers create content that works seamlessly on any device, the better off our sites will be.
Use a mobile-first approach. This means that instead of building your layout based on desktop browsers and then scaling down for mobile devices, build it from the bottom up.
Use a grid system. Utilizing grids in your designs helps keep everything aligned and orderly in every browser size—and they’re also pretty simple to implement.
Use media queries to change the layout as needed. You can use CSS3 or other tools to change the layout of your site depending on what screen it’s being viewed on (for example: changing from 2 columns to 3 columns when the screen gets too small).
Use flexible images instead of fixed-width ones so they will fill up any available space no matter how wide or narrow the browser window is!
How do you test your responsive design?
Test your mobile design
Use a mobile device to test the design. You might even want to have a few different devices on hand, so you can see how your site looks on different screen sizes and resolutions. If you don't have many friends with iPhones or Androids, try out the free app iBrowse by BrowserStack which allows you to access any mobile device via a browser window.
Test your desktop browser too. Although most people will be viewing websites on their phones these days, there are still plenty of folks who use desktop browsers (and they're not going away anytime soon). Make sure that all elements of your page are functioning correctly when viewed from this perspective as well!
Modern web design requires a lot of testing and constant evolution.
Modern web design requires a lot of testing and constant evolution. The results of your website will be vastly different depending on what kind of browser it's being viewed in, so we recommend that you test on as many browsers and devices as possible.
If you're building for mobile first, testing should start there—on real phones and tablets. Newer versions of Android have their own quirks when compared to iOS devices, so always test with popular Android phones like Samsung Galaxy and Motorola Droid before moving on to other operating systems like Windows Phone 8 or Blackberry 10.
It's also important to see how the site looks across different resolutions since most people are still stuck with 1024x768 resolution monitors that don't support Retina displays (you know what we mean). Even though you might be designing for high-DPI screens like Apple iPad Mini or Nexus 10 tablets now, users can still encounter issues when viewing on lower-resolution monitors.
The web is a big place, and it’s always changing. There are so many different browsers, devices, and operating systems out there that it can be difficult to keep up with everything. Remember: You don’t need to be an expert on all of them (JOVI is here for you), but you do need to make sure that your site works as it should in every one of them. That way you can make sure your visitors will have an enjoyable experience when they visit!
