Learning Responsive Web Design

Chapter 1. What Is Responsive Design?

By now pretty much everybody in the web world has heard of responsive web design (often referred to as RWD), but a surprising number don’t have a good understanding of what it is.

In this chapter, you’ll learn the basics of what it means for a website to be responsive. After that, we’ll go through a little of the history of web design, so you can understand where the idea of responsive design came from and how it compares to the old way of doing things.

We’ll also look at why responsive design is usually the best choice for making websites that will work well across different devices and screen sizes, and how it means less work in the long run. We’ll also look at a less obvious effect of choosing responsive design: how it impacts your search engine rankings.

Just the Basics

If you picked up this book because you’ve heard of responsive design, but you’re not quite sure what it is, this section will help you understand the basics.

Even if you’re somewhat experienced with responsive design, you’ve probably found that it can be difficult to explain it to others without using overly technical language. This section will give you a better idea of how to explain responsive design to users, to clients, to less technical team members, or to your mom, who wonders what it is you get paid to do all day.

Responsive design, overall, is a way to make websites that can be easily viewed and used on any type of device and size of screen, all the way from the smallest ...