What Are Responsive Layouts?

A lot of the talk has been “What are Responsive Layouts?”. I have recently really been hearing people talk and ask about them. I have been messing around with the Twitter Bootstrap framework for a good while now. And was really happy to hear that Joomla 3.0 was bringing not only jQuery to the core, but also Twitter Bootstrap.

What is it?

A responsive layout site is basically a website that is coded for any and every type of screen size. This might be overwhelming to think about but it is a lot easier to do than you think, mainly because of the many different frameworks (code bases) available.

Most of the responsive layouts features are all handled with CSS, some a little more with the help of jQuery and/or javascript.

Things To Know About Responsive Layouts

There are three “main” screens it is for, a regular desktop computer screen, a tablet screen (iPad, Kindle), and a mobile device screen (iPhone, Android, etc.).

The framework is built with “default” styles, from button styles to “built in” functions for a tabbing layout. There are a lot of things that come standard on Twitter Bootstrap, and it is very easy to implement even some of the more difficult things.

I love one of the slogans that Twitter Bootstrap uses, “By nerds, for nerds”… I may not be the best designer out there, but this stuff looks clean! It really is a great frontend UI (user interface) and makes my job a lot easier, I can worry more about the functionality than the layout and look now.

What Are Other Responsive Layout Frameworks?

Twitter Bootstrap
Foundation 3
Responsive Grid System
Gumby Framework