Responsive Mobile Website Development And Applications

There was a time when building a website meant first defining your canvas. What did the latest browser stats tell you about your visitors? Were low resolution monitors being sufficiently crowded out by those seductive widescreen monitors? In the bad old days, we would make the decision—usually arbitrarily as the web browser stats are so wide ranging — we will make it a static 960 pixels wide. That will fit nicely onto those old folks’ monitors still running at a 1024×768 resolution and leave a few pixels to spare. We would not to crowd the edges too terribly much.

But we are shifting into a new generation of website development. The trend actually started several years ago. As the smartphone and tablets became more and more ubiquitous, developers began looking for ways to deliver better experiences for mobile devices. For a while these took the shape of detecting a mobile device and sending them to another website that was stripped down, removing much of the website’s functionality and aesthetic appeal. It usually was not pretty, but it did the job. It allowed mobile users to access information with ease.

Enter to the world of responsive mobile website development

Then web browsers caught up. Several years ago, most modern web browsers reached a level of technological consistency that allowed for developers to build one website, with one set of content and show it to virtually any sized device and simple change the way the content is presented, simply by specifying specific style sheets.

It sounds simple. Almost too simple. And for all intents and purposes, it is. Mobile responsive design simply looks at the various common device sizes and says, “OK, you are a smartphone. I am going to go ahead make this block of text narrower, remove this thing that will just mess things up if we leave it in place and we will take this thing and center it and make it a little bit wider so that it all looks nicer for you.” The best is: it is all handled by the web browser. And unless you manually adjust your screen width or orientation, you’ll never know.

Creating responsive websites and mobile apps

Since mobile responsive design really took hold, there have been numerous frameworks that have been developed that make creating a mobile responsive website quick and easy to develop. The larger and most popular frameworks are designed with many common user interface elements built-in, requiring a developer to overlay their own custom styling to fit the custom design. Most frameworks also come with out of the box with functionality to ensure the vast majority of functionality works on older web browsers, so that your uncle running MS Windows can still see your brand new website, almost how you intended it.

Some of the popular frameworks used for developing websites and apps are:

• Foundation
• Bootstrap
• Skeleton
• Gumby Framework
• HTML5 Boilerplate
• Less Framework

There are dozens of frameworks as well as simplified templates that can get you setup with a basic structure that will allow you to easily and quickly develop mobile-responsive websites and applications. Choosing the right framework will depending greatly from project to project. Some frameworks come with a large amount of interface elements and components, while others are really just basic layouts and grids used to build a site from the ground up. It all depends on finding the right tool for the job.

With so many growth trends, it is us who have to make sure the concept of mobile website development become important in today's business world. We have already seen the rise in the number of developing mobile-friendly websites which are actually beneficial for both clients and business owners.