You might have heard the term responsive website and static websites. So what are they? Gone are the days where a website is just accessed from a chunky desktop sitting at home. The world has gone mobile and the rise of smartphones and a boom of internet connectivity has enabled people to access website access internet and host of internet services anywhere from any device. So you need the website to be capable of being displayed correctly on all devices with a myriad of different screen sizes. Basically, the website should be able to adapt to the screen size it is being viewed on and this is called responsive website.

You don't need a smartphone or a tablet to check whether a website is responsive or not. You can do it right here on your computer. So let me show you an amazing website, which I personally believe is a design inspiration. The website is of Karnataka BSNL circle. Why do I say to this inspiration. If someone can take this website and make it amazing and modern, I will hands down worship that person.

This website is a classic example of a website that is stuck in the early 90s. You can make out the Blinky stars, which are showing us the important notifications. You can see the GIF which is continuously changing, and I'm not even able to comprehend what it's saying. You can see that it's running flash, which is pretty much going to be phased out in the next three years. And you can see the toolbar is completely out of place. This is a bad website.

Now we can simulate the screen size of a mobile phone by changing the size of our browser window. You can see that this pretty much resembles a screen of a mobile phone or rectangle. Now, an unresponsive website. Basically, you have To site scroll to see the entire website over here, and it does not adapt to the screen size. This is an unresponsive website. So now let us see an example of a responsive website.

So let me head over to Chrome again and go to the national website of BSNL. That is nothing but BSNL de loops again BSNL code in and you can see this is a fantastic website, glorious user whitespace clear text, beautiful iconography covering sections for the customer to take the relevant actions. They have a beautiful call to action to download their mobile phone apps, slider with animations for lot of images over here on also a press release which basically gives out latest news and everything and a beautiful footer. This website is a good website and Being one of the largest telecom companies in India would be experiencing a lot of traffic and I bet the website back end or the servers are freely optimized. So let's see whether this website is responsive or not. Again, I'm going to do what I did with the Karnataka BSNL website, and I am going to change the window.

Excellent. You can see that the website completely adapted to the screen size it's being viewed on in this we're trying to simulate the screen size of smartphone, and you can see that whatever was horizontal, automatically stacked up vertically, and the entire menu has been condensed into something what we call the hamburger menu, because it resembles a hamburger and on clicking it, you can see that it creates a drop down. It's a beautiful responsive website. Let's try to simulate the size of a tablet and see how it behaves. Fantastic. You can see that the headers are automatically aligning to the screen.

So They have. And once it is being built on a sizable device, automatically the hamburger menu is gone, and a full fledged header is brought back up. This is an example of a responsive website. So why should we build responsive websites? Well, the first reason is, smartphone penetration is growing at an exponential rate. It is easier to get online than it was a few years ago.

Certain design philosophies have also cropped up. For example, there are a lot of websites which follow a mobile first approach. They designed particularly for a mobile phone to get desktop version takes a sideline. Mobile is growing, more people are going to be accessing the internet, doing stuff ordering products on their smartphone, not on their laptops. Mobile, responsive websites are the future. Also, with the integration of Various payment processes such as Samsung Pay Apple Pay.

The mobile phone is going to out grow the desktop in convenience, portability, ease of use and user experience.