Building websites that display well on everything from web-enabled smartphones to tablets, to laptops and desktops, is a daunting challenge. The myriad permutations of screen sizes and browser types might be a reason enough to not even try. But if your business counts on getting web content to people on these devices and you need your business to look tech-savvy, you must put your best foot forward. In this book, you will see that with the help of some easy-to-understand principles and an open source framework you can build a mobile first responsive website fast.
Chapter 1, Mobile First – How and Why? gives a quick introduction to mobile first strategy.
Chapter 2, Building the Home Page, dives right in and builds the face of your site and the foundation for the rest of the site.
Chapter 3, Building the Gallery Page, builds a responsive page to show off your work.
Chapter 4, Building the Contact Form, lets prospective clients contact you from a device of any screen size.
Chapter 5, Building the About Me Page, makes an attractive, responsive page to help people get to know you.
Appendix A, Anatomy of HTML5 Boilerplate, gives an overview of HTML5 Boilerplate, including meta tags and scripts.
Appendix B, Using CSS Preprocessors, helps you learn the basics of CSS Preprocessors and how to use them.
You should have Windows or Linux. The instructions in this book favor Mac OS X and Linux, but for the most part we will only be writing plain text and using very few command-line tools. In places where we do, I have done my best to offer up resources for how to get similar results on a Windows computer. You should also have a text editor. It will be very helpful if you know how to launch and use a command-line tool.
This book is for you if you are curious or excited about responsive design and how it can help in providing usable web interfaces on everything from mobile phones to desktop computers.
In terms of technical skills, this book is targeted at both beginners to intermediate developers as well as designers. In other words, you should already know how to build an HTML page and style it with CSS by using a text editor of some kind. You don't have to be an expert at any of these things though. You also don't need to be a command-line expert, but hopefully you are open to using command-line tools. They are quite helpful.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "When the browser replies yes to both screen and min-width 768px, the conditions are met for applying the styles within that media query."
A block of code is set as follows:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<head>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/main.css">
</head>
<body>
<button class="big-button">Click Me!</button>
</body>
</html>New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "I went ahead and created links to pages that don't exist yet, so if you click on them you will get a 404 file not found message."
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