7 Useful Tools for Responsive Web Design
When you create a responsive web design, you have to take into consideration the arrangement of things inside the website. You have to be sure that it will not compromise how the website would look when viewed through different devices and screen sizes. When creating a responsive website, there are dozens of tools that you could utilize in order to achieve what you want out of your responsive web design. Here are some of the helpful responsive web design tools that you could use on developing the site.
Adobe Edge Inspect
When you are sorting out how your webpage would look through different devices and different screen sizes, Adobe Edge Inspect would be a helpful tool to do that. With Adobe Edge Inspect, you are able to preview the presentation of your responsive site as it would be viewed on an iPad, Droid X, iPhone, Galaxy Nexus and other devices on one mobile device alone. You don’t have to have several devices on your table just to view the site on these different platforms.
Foundation
Another great tool for developing responsive websites is Foundation. With this tool, you can initially build responsive websites for small screen devices to serve as your basis or foundation. Then, as you go along your development, you can add more complex codes for your responsive design to make your site work on larger screens. What’s special about this tool is that it’s lightweight so you don’t have to worry about loading times and such; saving you time and effort into developing your responsive site.
RWD Calculator
Responsive Web Design or RWD Calculator is a tool that you can use for your Photoshop document so you can start using it on your responsive design website. This turns your PSD pixels into a percentage format so you are able to calculate the PSD’s size when it is being viewed on your responsive site.
Adaptive Images
When you talk about responsive web design, it is somewhat synonymous with most all small screen devices – that is smaller than your average laptop screen. This is where Adaptive Images come into play. It automatically detects the screen size of any device a responsive website is being viewed upon and automatically adjusts the image’s size to fit into that screen. This prevents lagging of the website when viewed on smaller screen devices.
Bootstrap
Initially made for the social networking site Twitter, this tool has made its way to the responsive web design community with its awesome features that are somewhat in line with the responsive web developer’s goal. It’s also made to look and function at its finest even when viewed in mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones especially when it’s being designed with the responsive format.
Retina Images
Retina Images is a tool to serve the different images on your website as they are being viewed via different mobile devices with different screen sizes. For example, when you want to view a certain image on a responsive website, Retina Images see through a couple of resolution conditions such as value sets in cookies to be able to identify the quality of image to be rendered. If all conditions are met, then Retina Images will serve you with high resolution images or if not, just the normal quality of that certain image. These are all done swiftly in just a few seconds.
SimpleGrid
One common thing when viewing a traditional website on a mobile device is the appearance of scrolls bars on the site to view the lower portion of the page. With SimpleGrid, it makes every single element of that certain page would simply fit on your screen size, making you view the entire page with one single screen, no horizontal scroll bars needed.
So those are just some of the very helpful and useful tools anyone can use when developing a responsive web design. With these tools, you can make sure your website would be seen in any mobile device, regardless of the size.
