Create a Responsive Web Design with Media Queries

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If you’ve yet to get your hands dirty with media queries, now is your chance to create your first responsive website design. In this tutorial we’ll look at converting one of my previous WordPress theme designs into a responsive layout, while taking into consideration the design’s original grid structure.

If you cast your mind back to late 2011, we went through the process of designing, coding and building ‘Typo’ into a complete WordPress theme. The design lends itself quite well to a responsive layout, so we’ll use the HTML and CSS as a base to transform the static layout into a responsive layout that will adapt to various viewport sizes.

When the viewport size of our browser is reduced on the original demo file we’ll see the site is cut off and ugly horizontal scrollbars are added. The idea of a responsive layout is to adapt to these various viewport sizes so the design remains legible. Smartphones and tablets will automatically scale the original website to fit, but creating specific layouts for those smaller resolutions will allow the site to be read easily without the need for zooming.

The first step to creating our responsive layouts is to plan out what resolutions we’re going to cater for. Common resolutions include the 320px portrait width of smartphones, 768px portrait width of tablets, 1024px landscape width of tablets (and typical netbook resolutions) as well as various desktop monitor resolutions. It’s worth mentioning that a layout that only caters for preset resolutions is often referred to as being ‘adaptive’, whereas a truly ‘responsive’ layout will be built using ems or percentages, allowing an infinite level of scaling.

<link href="mediaqueries.css" rel="stylesheet" />

We can then get started with CSS media queries to add the responsive functionality to our design. I’m adding the media queries and additional declarations to a separate CSS file, but they could be added to your main stylesheet.

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width; initial-scale=1.0">

We’ll also need to prevent the iPhone from automatically scaling the website to fit its screen, so this handy meta tag will tell Safari on the iPhone to set the device width to the size of its viewport.

@media screen and (max-width: 960px) {

}

The width of the original layout is 960px, so any resolution below this value will generate horizontal scrollbars and cut-off the content. Therefore the first of our media queries will target screens with a width of less than 960px;.

@media screen and (max-width: 960px) {
	#container, footer {
		width: 758px;
	}
	
	#content {
		margin: 0 20px 0 0;
	}
	
	#sidebar {
		width: 212px;
	}
		#sidebar section {
			clear: left;
		}
		#sidebar #search #searchbar {
			width: 152px;
		}
}

The next most popular resolution under 960px width is 768px to cater for portrait tablet screens. This Typo design is built using a grid, so to stay true to the layout we can simply remove a column to leave a width of 758px. The original layout can then be narrowed down to fit by reducing the margin on the content div as well as reducing the overall width of the sidebar.

@media screen and (max-width: 758px) {
	#container, footer, #sidebar {
		width: 524px;
	}
	
	header nav {
		clear: left; float: none; overflow: hidden;
	}
		header nav li {
			width: auto; margin: 0 25px 0 0;
		}
	
	header {
		margin: 0 0 44px 0;
	}
	
	header h1 {
		margin: 0 0 24px 0;
	}
	
	#sidebar section {
		float: left; clear: none;
	}
		#sidebar #social {
			margin: 0 20px 47px 0;
		}

	#sidebar #search #searchbar {
			width: 464px;
	}
}

The value of 758px can then be used for the next media query, so anything smaller than this size will trigger the next layout. At this point the sidebar is too narrow to be made any smaller, so instead it can be naturally flowed underneath the main content when the grid is narrowed by a few more columns. This means the actual sidebar div’s width can be increased to fill the width of the new layout and its child elements floated to fill out the extra horizontal space.
Other areas such as the header have become too narrow to hold the logo and navigation side by side, so the navigation elements are altered to span the width of the layout on a new line.

@media screen and (max-width: 524px) {
	#container, footer, #sidebar, #content {
		width: 292px;
	}
	
	#content article h2 {
		font-size: 24px;
	}
	
	#content .postinfo li {
		margin: 0 10px 0 0;
	}
	
	#sidebar #social {
			margin: 0;
		}
		
	#sidebar #search #searchbar {
		width: 230px;
	}
}

The third and final media query in our responsive layout will cater for extremely small resolutions such as smartphones. This particular layout is narrower than the original content width, so this div also needs altering with a new declaration in the media queries CSS file. The extremely narrow view has dropped each of the post-info links on a new line, but decreasing the margin between them helps repair some of the floats.

Thanks to these three sets of media queries our website layout is now responsive enough to cater for common viewport sizes and will aid readability by generating a designed layout in place of scrollbars or a scaled view. View the demo and scale your browser to see the responsive layouts for yourself.

View the responsive layout demo