Now that we've been introduced to grid layouts as a tenet of responsive design, it's a good opportunity to explore why we should use them. Creating a layout from scratch can be time consuming and needs lots of testing; there are some real benefits from using a grid layout:
- Grids make for a simpler design: Instead of trying to develop the proverbial wheel, we can focus on providing the content instead; the infrastructure will have already been tested by the developer and other users.
- They provide for a visually appealing design: Many people prefer content to be displayed in columns, so grid layouts make good use of this concept to help organize content on the page.
- Grids can of course adapt to different size viewports: The system they use makes it easier to display a single codebase on multiple devices, which reduces the effort required for developers to maintain and webmasters to manage.
- Grids help with the display of adverts: Google has been known to favor sites which display genuine content and not those where it believes the sole purpose of the site is for ad generation; we can use the grid to define specific areas for adverts, without getting in the way of natural content.
All in all, it makes sense to familiarize ourselves with grid layouts; the temptation is of course to use an existing library. There is nothing wrong with this, but to really get the benefit out of using them, it's good to understand some of the basics around the mechanics of grid layouts and how this can help with the construction of our site.
Let's take a quick look first at how we would calculate the widths of each element, an important part of creating any grid layout.
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