Fluid and flexible – what RWD is all about!

July 27, 2021 0 Comments

With the rise of smartphones and tablets, the devices that are increasingly used to access the Internet, there have been some challenges to Internet design. To provide the best viewing experience, a website must work as planned, which unfortunately does not always happen when accessed on a device other than the one planned, be it desktop or mobile. Although there are currently two different ways to approach this problem, it is important to understand what constitutes responsive design and why it is a superior product to adaptive design.

The problem

When the most popular computers that used to connect were located on a desktop with a full-screen monitor, or perhaps a full-size laptop screen, the problem of display issues was rare. The websites were built for today’s standard desktop resolution because most of the users shared the same technology and could get all their desired work done that way.

Since today’s Internet user has access to smartphones, tablets and small laptops to surf the web, the entire concern about the size of the display screen was turned upside down. Suddenly it seemed that websites that had been around for years were not easily viewable on such devices or were not working the way you wanted, because they weren’t coded for the different resolutions or screen sizes.

The solution

When it became clear that this problem had to be solved due to the increasing number of mobile device users, two solutions were developed: adaptive and responsive design. Adaptive involves creating duplicate websites designed to accommodate the sizes of different and popular mobile viewers. When a certain display size was recognized, the correct or better version for that type was sent to be downloaded only on that particular device. Responsive involves a more complex set of code that creates just one website that will change seamlessly to fit the device it was accessed on to provide the best possible user experience.

Generally speaking, both methods have pros and cons. Adaptive design is not foolproof at correctly recognizing individual devices and may offer to download the wrong version; Responsive design is perceived to lack the pizzazz found on larger, full-size websites. Considering the fact that the main reason to even have a website is that it can be viewed on a desktop, smartphone, or tablet, the responsive design ends up being the winner by far.

Responsive web design: an explanation

The main difference from responsive design that makes it more preferable to responsive design is that the resulting all-in-one website ends up having cleaner, more functional code; only one set of code is needed regardless of how it is accessed. The design flows into the space it finds available, rather than being a fixed dimension requiring different versions of the same site for each differently sized device.

While it is true that responsive website design requires a small reduction in the size of images, video, and preferably no flash, this is not always the case. The main concern is the speed at which the websites load; RWD with a single code set loads reasonably fast; With AWD, multiple versions of code are built into the same core code, all of which must be uploaded to the website to determine the device in order to render the page correctly.

Responsive design has vastly improved and has become the dominant force in design, which means that every website should consider converting to RWD. In the near future, conventional static websites will simply be unable to provide the smoothest user experience; Sticking with RWD provides a certain amount of assurance that websites can be viewed correctly on ALL mobile devices and platforms; That’s what RWD is all about!

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