Web Designers Best Tools for Responsive Website Design

As there are various platforms out there that make creating a website easy, a lot of individuals and business owners have started making their own. However, it is not nearly enough to simply have a website that is just nice to look at with all the details about your products and services. You need to think about the type of service you are offering your customers who visit your website. That is why more than ever before it is important to think about responsive website designs. 

Whether you are interested in web design as a hobby or you are thinking about your own website, you may wonder what type of tools are used by web designers to create a truly responsive website. To give you an idea, in the following post that is what we are going to discuss – some of the most popular and best tools available.

FitText

Let’s start with the typography. There are several great tools out there that can be used to provide your website with responsive typography. The one we wanted to highlight in this post however is FitText. This is a jQuery plugin that can be used to make all the headlines on your website responsive. You can use it to ensure the text on your site appears great no matter what device a visitor is using. Although simplistic, it is favored for the degree of flexibility it offers for text at precision web design.

imgSizer.js

Moving on from text to images, imgSizer.js is one tool that all responsive web designers should and often do use. The script in this tool has been devised to ensure all the images on your site render correctly when viewed on Microsoft Windows.

Responsive Layouts 

At the heart of all responsive websites is a flexible and fluid layout that can fully adapt to the specific features of a browser and the screen size of the device they are using. That’s why we are going to discuss the kind of resources you need to use when trying to sort the layout, as that’s where most of the responsiveness in website designs are. Fluid 960 Grid System, for example, is essential, with its grid system. 

However, if this feels a little too restrictive when it comes to designing the layout of web pages, then Gridless is ideal and has been built leaner and with more responsive designs a priority. 

Cross-Browser Support and Testing

After you have sorted the images to ensure they are flexible, that the layout is very fluid and the web typography is adaptive and clean, you need to then look at ensuring the site will work in the widest variety of different browsers and devices as possible and you need to do testing to make sure this is the case.

When it comes to testing a website on various devices, it’s best to test them from the actual devices. What do designers do rather than investing in every make and model of smartphones, computers, and tablets? They use Adobe Device Central. This has a constantly increasing library of deices you can test your site on.  Device Central is still on the pricey side for some modest budgets. For people who can’t afford it, though, there is Web Developer which is a browser extension available for both Chrome and Firefox with lots of great tools, like the built-in capability to resize the browser window with just a quick click. You can save and use presets easily. With it, you also have access to viewing CSS by the type of media and outlining all the elements contained, which is very useful for identifying where there are breakpoints in your design.