We’ve touched on responsive websites in previous articles, but have yet to do a deep and comprehensive dive. Well, folks, the time is now! We hope you have your smart-person glasses on; here’s everything you need to know about the complicated topic.

What We Mean By “Responsive Website”

In the design world, you’ll often hear the phrase “Responsive Web Design,” or RWD. This is a term used to describe the act of making a website more adaptable to different screen sizes, window types, and device types.

As with all areas of design, there are varying degrees of success when it comes to RWD. You could try to design a responsive website by yourself or with the help of a novice design friend. But if you truly want a responsive website, it’s worth spending the extra cash to hire a designer who knows what they’re doing.

We’ll talk about why it’s worth investing in a responsive website in just a bit. But before we get there, we want to give you an overview of what RWD entails.

Again, a responsive website is one that can detect a user’s screen size, device type, and orientation. It can also make changes to the layout of the page to optimize the user’s experience. To do that, a responsive website must have:

1. Adaptive Images

Adaptive, or flexible, images are ones that don’t have any display size restrictions. In other words, they are large enough to render well at any size without losing their clarity. A skilled designer can also work to display a different crop of the image (or sometimes even a different image altogether) depending on the user’s device type.

2. Adaptive Layouts

Responsive websites must be built on flexible grids. This allows certain features to adapt if they look good on one screen size but bad on another. For example, line length is one feature that should be flexible across all devices.

Thankfully, there are a few adaptive layout technologies that make this process possible. The ones you should know about are:

• Multicol (or Multiple Column Layout)
• Flexbox
• CSS Grid

A quality web designer will know how to use these methods to make a website fully functional and appealing across a range of devices and window types.

3. Adaptive Typography

An adaptive layout will also enable adaptive typography so that a website’s written content remains legible across all devices. Basically, this means that type size will vary depending on the device a user is searching from. In some cases, the content can even change from one column of text to two or more, depending on the screen size.

Nowadays, responsive websites are the golden standard for businesses both big and small. In other words, you absolutely need one. But we want to reiterate: this type of design is not easy. You can trust us to be honest with you when a design or marketing tactic is something you can try at home. Unless you have a background in CSS and/or HTML, this is not one of those times.