The world of web design is ever-changing, with trends one year rendered obsolete by the next. It’s vitally important for any web designer to keep on top of the rapidly changing landscape, or else you risk getting left behind!

One of the big trends of 2012 is responsive web design. Internet users are increasingly using a range of devices, all of which have different screen sizes and ways in which the user interacts and controls the device(touchscreen, mouse, etc). 2012, in particular, has seen an explosion in the types of devices being used – just considering mobile devices, there are still thousands of different screen sizes. Take into account tablets and the vast amount of screen sizes on home computers, and the importance of responsive web design becomes clear.

Responsive Web Design

Responsive web design predominantly involves using CSS3 to create fluid layouts that will adapt to any screen size. Using responsive web design means that users can access content across a range of platforms and not suffer from usability issues such as scrolling, awkwardly resized content and panning.

Being such a huge and vital trend, responsive web design has been approached in a number of ways by various web design experts. Ethan Marcotte actually came up with the term in an article for A List Apart, and much of his work informs what have come to be responsive web design’s main principles, such as flexible images.

Jeffrey Zeldman, however, takes a slightly different approach to the challenge of RWD. Zeldman, who is an advocate of the movement, preached simplicity in his own web design manifesto. One of the issues coming out of RWD was ad-heavy cluttered layouts removing focus from the main content of a page. Zeldman illustrated his own solution to this by virtue of redesigning his own site with a single column layout and massive text.

HTML5 and CSS3

HTML5 and CSS3 have also become essential tools for web designers in 2012, with older mark-up languages gradually being phased out. Learning and mastering these tools is imperative for any designer looking to create quality and innovative websites in the present climate – as well as responsive sites.

HTML5 is supported by all major browsers already, and has a number of benefits – tags that can help search engines index your content properly and improved accessibility being just two. CSS3, as alluded to be previously, is great for creating responsive sites and is fast becoming a web design standard.

Mobile

As predicted in previous years, the amount of users accessing the web on their phone is increasingly rapidly, and designing for mobile devices is now almost as important as designing for the desktop. Designing a site for use on mobile devices can be achieved in a number of ways. Making an existing site responsive is one such way, whilst building a site from scratch is another.

Generally, mobile sites built for purpose are the best way forward and offer the best user experience. This means that having the skills to design sites for mobile is essential, as well as being aware of mobile users expect – a focus on content and simple, easy-on-the-eye layouts.

Ben Greenwood is writing on behalf of Fluid Creativity, specialists in web design

Ben Greenwood is writing on behalf of Fluid Creativity (http://www.fluidcreativity.co.uk), specialists in web design

Author Bio: Ben Greenwood is writing on behalf of Fluid Creativity, specialists in web design

Category: Internet
Keywords: web design, web development