What is Responsive Design?

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I have read that in the near future there will be more mobile internet users than the traditional internet desktop user. With the advancement in mobile technology, it makes it easy for users to give up a more traditional way of surfing the internet.

Since going mobile is so popular and only getting more popular, what are web owner and developers to do? The first thing to do is to recognize that mobile devices aren’t going to go away any time soon. This means that the traditional web design (safe screen resolutions) are not as important as they use to be. Next, website owners and developers need to implement fluid and responsive designs into their sites and designs.

So What is Responsive Design?

Responsive design literally means that the website responds to whatever size the user is using to view the website. That means, you can view a website with a traditional desktop, 50inch internet TV device, tablet, or even a small smartphone, and the design always looks good!

With responsive design, there is no need to have a different design for each device that can access the internet.  Responsive designs use CSS, HTML, flexible grids/layouts, coding techniques to scale the viewed page to the viewer’s screen.

How to Tell if the Site You Are Viewing is Responsive

If you want to find out if a site is responsive, all you have to do is adjust the size of your web browser from smaller to larger. If it looks good at any size then the website is responsive (the page elements adjust in a fluid way) . But I found, this isn’t the best way to test a theme or a look of a page. To get the right screen size for whatever screen size you need, check out resizeMYBrowser or you could check out resosivepx. Both sites make it easy to see what a site will look at any screen size or device resolution.

Responsive Web Design Tools and Tutorials

To get you started with responsive design, here are a few tutorials and tools to help you get up to date. These are just a few of the great articles, tools, and tutorials that I have read over the last year and found helpful.

• Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marotte
• Responsive Web Design: What It Is and How To Use It
• Adaptive Images
• How To Use CSS3 Media Queries To Create a Mobile Version of Your Website
• Designing for a Responsive Web
• Create a Responsive Web Design Template
• Responsive Design with CSS3 Media Queries
• Building fast and responsive websites
• Responsive Web Design Testing Tool
• inuit.css
• How to Build a Responsive Thumbnail Gallery
• Skeleton — A Beautiful Boilerplate for Responsive, Mobile-Friendly Development

Premium Responsive WordPress Themes

If designing your own responsive theme or website isn’t something want to do, you can always select a premium wordpress theme from the growing list of great premium theme design companies.  Here are few of the latest examples of premium WordPress themes from some of my favorite premium WordPress theme sites.

Eleven40 Theme

“Our intelligent design will capture your reader’s attention and then keep it by instantly detecting mobile devices and adjusting size to suit. Wider is better with the eleven40 theme. “

Generate Theme

”The Generate theme aims all the power and flexibility of Genesis at your most important asset. It’s designed to elegantly lead your site traffic to one action – join the email list.”

Trim

“Trim is simple, professional, versatile and fast. We have had a lot of requests for a less stylistic, lightweight design, and that is exactly what we created. Trim might be simple, but with that simplicity comes a sense of balance and crispness that is quite refreshing. Coupled with a bunch of great features, Trim is a great theme that will prove useful for a variety of different websites.“

Chameleon WordPress Theme

“Chameleons are known for their ability to change the color of their skin. The patterns and color combinations you find in chameleons are almost endless, and our new theme is no different! Chameleon was created to be a simple and professional theme with loads of customization options that do not require web development experience to utilize.“

Shahrzad Responsive Corporate WordPress Theme

“Shahrzad is a responsive WordPress Theme perfect for Business, Cooperates, Agency.”

Flagship – Responsive Business and Portfolio

“Flagship is a responsive WordPress Theme (try resizing your browser), suited for business websites and users who want to showcase their work on a neat portfolio site. The Theme is built on top of the fabulous Avia Framework and offers support for the WPML MULTI LANGUAGE plugin, just in case you need it.”