Books | Responsive Web Design

Do you want to build web pages, but have no previous experience? This friendly guide is the perfect place to start. You’ll begin at square one, learning how the Web and web pages work, and then steadily build from there. By the end of the book, you’ll have the skills to create a simple site with multi-column pages that adapt for mobile devices.

Learn how to use the latest techniques, best practices, and current web standards—including HTML5 and CSS3. Each chapter provides exercises to help you to learn various techniques, and short quizzes to make sure you understand key concepts.

This thoroughly revised edition is ideal for students and professionals of all backgrounds and skill levels, whether you’re a beginner or brushing up on existing skills.

• Build HTML pages with text, links, images, tables, and forms
• Use style sheets (CSS) for colors, backgrounds, formatting text, page layout, and even simple animation effects
• Learn about the new HTML5 elements, APIs, and CSS3 properties that are changing what you can do with web pages
• Make your pages display well on mobile devices by creating a responsive web design
• Learn how JavaScript works—and why the language is so important in web design
• Create and optimize web graphics so they’ll download as quickly as possible

Design and deliver an optimal user experience for all devices

About This Book

• Get to grips with the core functionality of RWD through examples
• Discover how to make layouts, content and media flexible, and explore why a content-first approach is more effective
• Maximize the performance of your web pages so that they work across all browsers and devices irrespective of the screen size

Who This Book Is For

This book is for web designers who are familiar with HTML and CSS, and want to begin with responsive web design. Web development experience and knowledge of HTML5, CSS3 is assumed.

What You Will Learn

• Explore various layout options
• Understand what can be achieved in the browser, without the use of third-party tools
• Executing media queries to benefit responsive designs
• Understand the basics of responsive workflow and boilerplate frameworks
• Improve performance of responsive web design
• Maintain compatibility across various browsers

In Detail

Responsive web design (RWD) is a web design approach aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing and interaction experience—providing easy reading and navigation with minimum resizing, panning, and scrolling—and all of this across a wide range of devices from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones. Responsive web design is becoming more important as the amount of mobile traffic now accounts for more than half of the Internet’s total traffic.

This book will give you in depth knowledge about the basics of responsive web design. You will embark on a journey of building effective responsive web pages that work across a range of devices, from mobile phones to smart TVs, with nothing more than standard markup and styling techniques.

You'll begin by getting an understanding of what RWD is and its significance to the modern web. Building on the basics, you'll learn about layouts and media queries. Following this, we’ll dive into creating layouts using grid based templates. We’ll also cover the important topic of performance management, and discover how to tackle cross-browser challenges.

Style and approach

This is a practical example-based book which will delve into various elements and benefits of a responsive web design. It will help you understand the essential skills needed to create responsive web sites and guide you through the basics of building responsive web pages for any device. The topics are a blend of theoretical and practical essentials which will assist you to explore more about responsive web design.