Responsive Web Design (RWD)
Responsive Web Design (RWD) is a technique suggesting that design and development should correctly respond to the users’ environments and behavior based on their platform, screen size, and orientation. According to Sutton (2018), the responsive web design is a development approach that introduces dynamic changes to the overall appearance of a web page or the entire website, depending on the node’s size and orientation or devices being used to access it. With this technique, page elements and contents reshuffle as the viewport shrinks and increases. Responsive web design consists of various layouts and flexible grids, videos, images, and intelligent use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) media queries. As the surfer or user switches between screen sizes, for example, from a Smartphone to a laptop, smart television, or vice versa, the web pages must automatically switch simultaneously to accommodate all elements, including resolution, image size, font size, and other scripting abilities. However, to effectively achieve responsive design elements, the user may also have to consider altering their device settings on private networks that may block their access to responsive pages. Simply put, responsive web design and development is a technology that automatically responds to a user’s preferences to eradicate the need for a different design or development phase for every new device in the market.
A responsive web page or website has a fluid and easily flexible layout design that adjusts accordingly concerning screen size (de León, 2016). The importance of responsive web design and development is that it offers an optimized browsing experience to all users. Before introducing a responsive web design, developers had to build more than one site to accommodate different screen resolutions and sizes. Responsive web design is also important because it allows designers and developers to relay the content based on the available browser space. Lastly, this development is important because it allows for equal opportunity between users and consistency of content between what a website displays on a desktop screen and what is received through a hand-held gadget. Responsive web design is the “traditional” design option that remains the most popular technique available to modern developers when creating front-end interfaces.
A personal expedition of various responsive websites attests that the strategy has developed into a basic tool for web development for organizations that seek to remain relevant amongst the clientele. For example, Emirates Airlines has a responsive booking platform that allows travelers to make flight bookings from a device of their choice (available at https://www.emirates.com/ke/english/). The responsive forms on the website respond easily by rearranging the content to fit with changing screen sizes. The approach is definitely incomparable because it makes a website mobile-friendly and improves the overall outlook for front-end pages.
While Agile development is a maturation process in which functionality is broken down into manageable sizes, responsive web development can adopt this approach by improving how web content looks on devices with both small and large screens. Agile web development is a broad category of techniques founded on the principles whose goal is to allow for flexibility and provide continuous improvement of websites (Torrecilla-Salinas, 2015). Agile development is well-equipped to handle complex websites by developing the website in shorter sprints or iterations but in a specified order. The agile approach effectively achieves user expectations by continuously delivering tested, working, and prioritized web features.