Responsive Design is a leap forward in the web design industry that effects both designing and developing for the web. The constantly rising popularity of smart devices (tablets, phones etc.) has created a serious demand for websites that are viewable on small displays. Responsive Design is not the same as mobile design. Mobile design entails creating an entirely new website or web app with content specifically created for the mobile experience. Responsive Design, on the other hand, means that the same domain, the same content, and the same syntax — more or less manipulated by JavaScript and/or CSS3 Media Queries — respond to different viewports to provide the best user experience possible for each device. The different viewports include desktop monitors, laptops, tablets, and mobile devices and their corresponding orientations. Responsive Design, as the underlying base of a websites’ deployment, uses flexible or fluid grids, fluid images, and CSS3 Media Queries to adapt to the viewers’ different device widths and resolutions. Developing Responsive Design is rarely a process with an ending, but rather it’s an ongoing effort to optimize the user experience on different viewpoints. As more and more different devices with access to the web enter the market, it is essential that a website can fluidly adapt to multiple screen sizes. Web developers and designers have to go through a shift in thinking about how to cater the design to different viewports. A website needs to look good but, most importantly, it needs to be equally usable on a smartphone, tablet, e-reader, and desktop or laptop. A 2012 TechCrunch Survey predicted that by 2013, mobile devices would overtake desktop PCs as the dominant global Internet platform, with a projected 1.9 billion users on mobile devices in 2015, compared to “only” 1.6 billion desktop internet users. So why haven’t you started creating responsive websites yet? Responsive Design may have started as a trend, but it has quickly become an evolutionary step in web development and design that has greatly affected design and technology. Google recommends webmasters follow the industry best practice of using responsive web design, namely serving the same HTML for all devices and using only CSS Media Queries to decide the rendering on each device. Source: Google Developers