Start with RESS and end up with a lightweight Responsive Website Design

Web medium is embracing every design, every concept that is coming in its way. The architectural concepts of web designing are changing at a rapid pace. Not only they are moving on a positive trajectory, but are also instrumental in providing better user-experience.

Business ventures have made online marketing as their priority and are advancing further for better reach. So, in this process, even websites saw the transition from static to dynamic to support maximum devices. It can be either desktop or mobile; the need for performance enhancement will always be there.

If you have a website, then the chance of getting visits through mobile phones is greater than the desktops. Then the need to dish out new ideas for making them more approachable and user-friendly is definitely needed. Fluid grids, media queries, and well we have heard about these whenever we are in the domain of responsive designs. The only factor which is making RWD closer to developers is the one code base concept, but when it comes to backward compatibility, bugs or image resizing they loathe responsive designs.

Now a new concept is around the corner, like, what will be the outcome when client-side and server-side solutions are combined to enhance the performance of responsive websites. Well, not a bad idea because most of the time developers used to concentrate only on either of the aspect. This new notion is given a name, which is RESS.

Introduction to RESS

RESS which stands for Responsive Design + Server Side Components is a concept where the idea is to amalgamate the aspects of both server and client side of a responsive website. Under RESS the main agenda is to make sure that the content is being accessed without any glitch across all the devices.

This is achieved through the combination of open source software and a device-detection library. The optimization process can be performed through the following steps,

• Reduce Image Payload– Whether it is a low-resolution device or a high-resolution device, if they are sent with the same payload, then the outcome will be awful. So, to avoid this RESS made use of device detection process, wherein, the browser can alter the dimensions of an image in accordance with the device. PageSpeed is one such web server module from Google that effectively deals with the JavaScript and CSS files.
• Reduce JavaScript & CSS Payload– Multi-device consistency requires a developer to concentrate on various aspects. Apart from image size, there is a need that even JavaScript and CSS should be given some importance. Because, most of the low-end devices do not support these elements, hence the chances of maintaining consistency are very less. Hence, in order to avoid this, it is necessary that we scrap CSS and JavaScript in the case of low-end devices.This action ensures that there will no hiccups during page loading to avoid performance degradation.
• Bandwidth Detection– Suppose the available bandwidth is very low, so how will your browser deal with it. A regular approach leads to acquiring a high-resolution image which can result badly for the user. So, depending on the bandwidth available if a browser is able to compress the image size, then it will provide soothing results. W3C is the best option in order to avail the bandwidth information for the browsers. Once it is accomplished, the process of image size reduction without compromising the pixel size will be a possible task.

Page weight has a greater importance in deciding the performance of a device; hence it is necessary to adopt these steps for providing greater user-experience.