With the introduction of mobile devices as modern mini computers with the Internet connection has changed the scenario of the entire web, personal life, and businesses across the world.
Increasing numbers of mobile users have compelled everyone aligned with the web anyhow to go for the mobile-friendly web. Even Google is not allowing websites or web portals to rank if they lack mobile friendliness.
Technically, the creation of mobile-friendly web has several ways to hit the goals, but responsive web design is the most practical, feasible, and affordable way to go. Therefore, the modern web developers need to have Responsive Web Design (RWD) skills in their arsenals to sustain in the market, and web development companies give priorities in their selection process.
In due course, we have initiated this post to give some subtle clues regarding responsive web development tools for upcoming days in 2018. Technically, we know besides designing, and programming skill sets, know-how regarding the tools used in the technologies are crucial aspects of grabbing attentions in the market for any developer.
Therefore, we have listed such essential and advanced tools to deliver excellent outputs for a responsive web designing project. For the sake of comprehension, we have segregated RWD tools into following categories:
- Grid and Frameworks
- Sketch Sheets and Wireframes
- Downloadable Scripts – JS & jQuery
- Testing and Previewing Tools
- Sliders
- Miscellaneous Tools
Contents
Responsive Web Design Grid & Frameworks
It is an open source and free to use framework gifted by Mark Otto and Jacob Thornton at Twitter. Since it requires knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript only to code and has easy to use, from fresher to seasoned web developers like it equally.
It offers an excellent set of UI elements, grids, layouts, JavaScript tools, and some other advanced tools to accomplish challenging tasks with ease.
It provides 12-column responsive grid system to design responsive websites and web applications for all tiny to large computing devices/screens.
Developers can use tools provided by Bootstrap to customize variables, components, and JavaScript plugin.
Skeleton
It is a simple, efficient, and robust CSS framework without any heavy-lifting with JavaScript code. It is based on a 960.js grid system so easily loads on mobile devices. It helps developers to develop styles on the top, so it is a style-oriented framework to work.
Skeleton assists in styling standard HTML elements, so it is suitable for small projects too. Therefore, seasoned web designers prefer it for various easy to complex projects.
Semantic Grid System
It would be the perfect choice when you go to design responsive grid layouts. It uses LESS, SCSS, or Stylus like pre-processed CSS extensions to achieve maximum efficiency. It lets you apply your selected column and gutter widths, numbers, and also allows you to switch between the pixel and percentage units. Check out the official documentations if you want to use it in your next project.
Susy
It offers everything that Semantic Grid System is offering. Additionally, it is using no extra markup and any other special classes. Susy has been developed keeping SaaS and its extension Compass users.
Sketch Sheets and Wireframes
Without wireframe and prototype creation, web designers never pulled out underneath ideas and needs of clients. Therefore, sketch sheets, wireframe, and prototyping tools are at the center to extract all and come up with layouts for the final designing process.
Some modern tools are quick, easy, and interactive using advanced technologies and techniques to provide satisfactory results.
Responsive Wireframes
Developed as an experimental tool and now used as open source tool for free. It’s built in using only HTML and CSS without any image or JavaScript like scripts. Therefore, it enjoys supports of all devices including mobiles.
It lets you visualize different wireframes and prototypes as it appears in actual browsers. You can insert various UI elements, colors, and have text as well as resizing options.
You can readjust layout components using drag-n-drop methods in the user interface. Moreover, you can set devices in the preview to check the responsiveness of design upfront.
Wirefy
It is a highly acceptable tool among the responsive web designer communities. All you need to have is good knowledge of HTML and CSS to quickly and creatively generate wireframes without indulging into the various types of calculations.
Technically, it is an accumulation of responsive HTML snippets and templates, which are capable of scaling to browsers scale/resize across multiple devices. With the help of Adobe Edge Inspect, you can see previews for iPhone, iPad, Droid X, Galaxy Nexus, and other devices.
Style Tiles
It allows developers to curate a design idea using the gist of colors, typography, animation, and other elements without mess up complicated styles. Thus, it offers complete design workflow and abilities to integrate changes inspired by the client and test users’ feedback.
Testing and Previewing Tools
Responsive web design testing and previewing tools allow you to test web design in different contexts, use cases, and to preview it on various screen sized simultaneously on a single screen.
Responsive Design Test Tool
It is a gift from CSSChopper to help to check the responsiveness of the website in question. With this tool, you can check your site and its performance metrics on any size of the screen of any device.
ProtoFluid
It allows you to test your mobile screen friendly website prototypes on myriads of screens sizes and resolutions. It offers options to select the device type and need to feed URL to launch the website to test.
Photofluid also lets you use other web-based extensions including FireBug to accomplish other QA functions.
ReView.Js
It is a dynamic viewport system working using pure JavaScript. Thus, you can get fantastic viewing experiences for your responsive web design that hardly possible with any other tool. Review.js can be downloaded for free of cost. You can even fork it on GitHub and can further contribute to this awesome project.
Screenfly
It enables developers to view responsive websites in a diverse range of devices and web browsers including desktops, smartphones, tablets, and TVs. Screenfly provides options to enable or disable scrolling, rotating, and other touch functions to test UX of the design.
Downloadable Scripting Solutions
Downloadable scripts such as JavaScript, jQuery, and CSS Media Query are providing excellent tools to aid in responsive web design, and without it, responsiveness against devices & screens and interactive capabilities are not possible.
Adapt.Js
It is an excellent JavaScript solution and provides alternative to the CSS media query because support for media query is limited in numbers of mobile browsers and particularly when it is disabled by users willingly.
It is a very lightweight JavaScript library and capable of overcoming such problems.
Isotope
It is an amazing jQuery plugin to help in designing the responsive websites. Isotope helps to rearrange the UI elements of the web page when the window of browser resized. Moreover, it also aids in the filter the UI elements during resizing.
Wookmark jQuery Plugin
For responsively designed websites, required loading elements by early detection of screen size or types of the device make much sense in terms of loading and other performance metrics.
This jQuery plugin helps server to detect the window size of the client-browser as well as arrange the UI elements accordingly in columns. Also, it allows you to inspect a live preview at the bottom side of the webpage itself.
Sliders for Responsive Web Design
Carousel or sliders are new ways to augment content and presentation in innovative ways. However, traditionally built sliders on the websites are hardly responsive and need to code and design to make them mobile friendly.
Some scripting & CSS based tools or plugins/extensions are capable of bringing responsiveness or adaptability to various screen sizes.
Responsive CSS 3 Slider
It is pure CSS3 based responsive slider without any use of JavaScript. It can adapt to any screen size as well as resolution with the least hassles. When the slider is adjusting to the width of mini screen sizes like that of smartphones, the navigation arrows go inside the box to offer ease with space management. You can fork this slider on codepen and can further edit it to suit your requirements.
Elastislide
It is a jQuery dependent carousel that adjusts automatically to the screen size of the device in question. Therefore, its content and layout prove responsive when integrated with your mobile-friendly website too. It offers enough options to make decent presentations of the content in responsive web design.
So, if you are willing to use it you can download the required files along with demo content from Codrops.
ResponsiveSlides.Js
It is incredibly lightweight (1Kb) and straightforward jQuery plugin to create responsive sliders for a range of devices and browsers. It uses unordered list method to define text content and images.
It works on a wide range of browsers including previous versions of IE and the latest browsers with the most recent versions.
Miscellaneous Tools
Some minor tools are essential to accomplishing many big tasks in responsive web design like tools for images, texts, and tables.
Retina Images
Setting high resolutions images for retina display on mobile devices is a tedious and time-consuming task for designers as well as programmers. Fortunately, Retina Images is an excellent JavaScript-based solution to accomplish it automatically on the server and deliver@2X images with high resolutions and size according to the devices in question.
What you need to provide is high-resolution images for all images included in your website or web pages, and it can manage it all automatically.
FitText.Js
Adjusting text size/font size is tricky and demands some extra coding in CSS and HTML of responsive design on each page and content block. In due course, this JavaScript tool helps to resize text blocks and headlines automatically when browser sizes are changing on different devices.
Thus, fittext eliminates text size mismatch and disruption in overall UX of the website on a range of different screens during responsive web design.
Zurb
Now, we have to deal with big data in the information-dense digital ecosystem on the web. Therefore, tables are essential to make a compelling presentation of tons of data on the websites and web portals.
Mobile-friendliness is must today for any web identity, so we have to deal with data tables in responsive web design too. In due course, Zurb is providing CSS and JavaScript-based responsive tables to resize tables with comprehensive presentations. It eliminates modifications in tables and responsive layouts during responsive web design.
Conclusion:
Today we are developing highly sophisticated yet easy to use web identities like websites, web applications, and web portals using modern web designing and programming technologies, tools, and techniques.
Among those, responsive web development is the latest tech trends on the web development front and demands some levels of skills as well as experiences from the web developers and web development companies.
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