Creating responsive web designs is not only about arranging the elements in a way so that they don’t compromise the look of the site on different screen sizes; it is also about enhancing the user experience. The best way to approach the designing on responsive web designs is to fully utilize the tools to ensure great results in minimum time and cost.
You found a great piece of information online; in the excitement you click it on the smartphone with great anticipation. But in no time, you find yourself leaving the page because you don’t want to deal with scrolling and zooming and forget about clicking anything. There is no doubt that without a responsive web design many businesses are losing on their conversions.
With the browsing landscape expanding into netbooks, mobile devices, tablets and desktops, a responsive web design is the need of the hour. Three basic ingredients to responsive web design are flexible grids and wireframes, images and testing tools.
There are number of tools and plugins available to make the tedious task of responsive web design easier. Let’s find out popular and fantastic tools for responsive web design:
1. Responsive Web Design Sketch Sheets: This tool is beneficial to map out the placement of various website layout elements across different devices. This tool allows you to get an idea as where to place the important elements keeping the resolution and screen size in mind.
2. Style Tiles: Style Tiles are design deliverables that consist of colors, interface elements and fonts that communicate the basic essence of the visual brand of a website. The tools help to create a common visual language between stakeholders and designers. This saves the designer from creating multiple Photoshop mockups to show different interface choices.
3. Golden Grid System: It is a fluid-grid system that serves as the initial point of responsive web designing. It let designers create unique and interesting pages that range from 240 to 2560px. It offers an elastic gutter that helps in creating proportional content keeping the screen size in mind. There is also a baseline grid that can be zoomed easily.
4. Gumby 2: It is a great responsive web designing framework which is user-friendly and easy to download. Also it can be customized without much of efforts. Gumby 2 has a collection of tools like responsive images, intrinsic ratio video embeds, dropdowns, drawers, tabs, templates, buttons, grids, Entypo icons, toggles, switches and forms
5. Retina Images: This tool serves different images on the basis of the device used by the viewer. You need to setup this tool on the website and it creates high-resolution versions of images to the optimized for retina screens. Designers need not change <img> tags. When the viewer loads the page, a cookie holding the ‘Device Pixel Ratio is set by JavaScript or CSS. And when the image is requested, the .htaccess file tells the retinaimages.php to load, but there are few conditions that it must fulfill.
6. The Responsinator: This tool helps designer get to see how their responsive website looks on popular devices like iPhone, iPad, Kindle and Android devices. This tool shows the site both in landscape and portrait mode. As there are outlines of the devices on the page, it takes the usability and experience to another level.
Not all responsive web designing projects require all these tools. Good WordPress website designers restrict the use of these tools that are necessary to achieve the desired goals.
Author Bio
Ashish Sharma works at WebApps Techmagnate as a software developer but spends his spare time to writing useful posts about Professional Website Development. He has spent over 5 years in this Industry and still curious to adopt and learn new things quickly.