What is CSS Responsive Web Design and How to Implement it?

Today, most of the visitors to a website use their phones to view a website. In the past, when the websites were not explicit, or you needed to scroll to read all text or zoom in to read the text on a website whole opening it on mobile or tablets.

The website nowadays is user-friendly and easily readable with responsive design, which influences visitors and increases online presence. In this CSS responsive design tutorial, you will learn how you can make your website responsive.

What is CSS Responsive Web Design?

CSS Responsive Web design is a method of developing web properties that allow design and code to respond to the device’s screen size. It gives you the best viewing experience, whether you’re looking at a 6 inch android mobile, your iPad mini or a 42-inch display.

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Why is Responsive Design So important?

Here are a few reasons why CSS responsive web design is important -

  • Device-Independent Rendering

This is the most important advantage of responsive design. With so many kinds of devices in use now, there is no uniform standard of size, shape, or display parameters across devices. This is where responsive design comes into play, as it makes devices optimal in their firmware environments.

  • Usage Experience

A responsive website will lead to a more robust user experience. The number of time a user spends on your site may be a key factor that indicates the quality of the user experience. If they find it difficult to navigate or use your website because they're forced to continuously pinch and center, they'll not be your website. And if your website scales and reacts to the change in screen size, visitors won’t have trouble accessing menu options, links, buttons, or filling out forms. As a result, the user experience will be way better and so they're going to spend significantly more time on your site.

A Mobile-First Approach to Responsive Web Design

The Mobile-first approach means to design the mobile website first and dealing up to the desktop version. There are a variety of reasons why this approach is effective and preferred.

  • A mobile website is more complex to style, so it’s practical and more efficient for the first focus to fix the mobile design.
  • It’s easier to rescale the mobile version than it's to scale down the desktop version.

Setting the Viewport

Pages optimized for a variety of devices must include a meta viewport tag in the document's head. Add the following <meta> tag to all your web pages:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">

Responsive Images

Images that can be scaled to fit in size are known as responsive images.

How to Make Image Responsive?

By Using the Width Property

Set the width to 100% to make the image responsive and scale up and down.

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Using the Max-Width Property

You can also make the image responsive by using the max-width property. The advantage of this property is that you can never scale up to be larger than the image’s original size.

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Responsive Text Size

You can make the text responsive by using the viewport-width property. Let’s see an example.

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What is Media Query?

According to the MDN, the CSS Media Query gives you a way to apply CSS only when the browser and device environment matches a rule that you specify.

Syntax:

@media media-type and (media-feature-rule) {

  /* CSS rules go here */

}

Now, take an example to see the use of media query

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Conclusion

Responsive design is a concept that, when implemented correctly, can improve the user experience. It does not completely solve it for every user, device, and platform. You will need to constantly improvise with new devices, resolutions, and technologies to improve the user experience in the coming years.

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Regarding this CSS Responsive Design tutorial, If you have any feedback for us and need any queries answered, don't hesitate to share them in the comments section of this tutorial page. Our team of subject matter experts will review them and respond to you very soon.

Happy learning!

About the Author

Aryan GuptaAryan Gupta

Aryan is a tech enthusiast who likes to stay updated about trending technologies of today. He is passionate about all things technology, a keen researcher, and writes to inspire. Aside from technology, he is an active football player and a keen enthusiast of the game.

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