The technological revolution has changed the way people interact with companies and businesses. Nowadays, the digital presence of a company is more important than its physical existence. Customers search for products and services on search engines first. A quality, responsive website of your business can make a great first impression in this regard.
Fundamentals of Responsive Web Design:
Your website is the face of your brand. It is important to bear in mind that people will be accessing your website through multiple devices. You don’t want your visitors to experience a bad interface just because their screen resolution is different. Therefore, it is important to create a responsive web design for all screen sizes. Here are the fundamentals of responsive web design.
1. Responsive Vs. Adaptive:
There are two basic types of responsive web designs: Adaptive and Responsive.
Adaptive web designs adapt to only certain types of devices (or browsers). For instance, you design a website for perfect results on the desktop computer and Mobile device. Now if a user browses the web pages on a tablet device than he/she will have to zoom in or out to make the web content fit into the screen.
A responsive website, on the other hand, automatically adjusts to the screen sizes. The content shrinks or expands in size and other features according to the type of display.
As a developer, you have to figure out what best suits the need of your website.
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2. Principle of Flow:
Websites are built on HTML documents. Each one of these has an intrinsic flow of elements. The contents of the page take more vertical space as the size of the screen changes. You have to bear this principle in mind while building websites.
Oftentimes CTA buttons are placed on the corner of business websites keeping in view the bigger screen sizes. Resultantly, when visitors browse these web pages on the mobile device the CTA buttons go too far below. This can damage the conversion rate. Therefore, developers of responsive websites have to take care of floe while placing elements and content on pages.
3. Relative Units:
Relative units are relative to some other sizes. The relative lengths units are specified about some other lengths. These are signified by the ex, em, ch rem, and vw etc.
ex: Relative to the X-height of the font in use.
em: Relative to the font size of the element.
ch: Relative to the width of “0”.
rem: Relative to 1% of the width of viewport.
Relative values help developers decided how much things are going to scale in relation to other values.
4. Design At Least 3 layouts:
Designing at least three layouts of your websites is crucial in building responsive web designs. Here are three sizes to go with.
Below 600px: This small layout will help you see how content will appear on smartphones.
600px-900px: This is a medium layout of website. It depicts the content’s size and positioning on the tablet or other large phones.
Over 900px: It will be your large layout. This shows how content will appear on desktop computers and laptops etc.
Use the same content in terms of text and graphics for all three sizes. Subsequently, scale it best possible display on different devices. Developers of a responsive website often achieve this by converting three columns of content into one column.
5. Breakpoint:
The websites respond at breakpoints to provide visitors with the best possible layout for the consumption of information. While designing web pages for different screen sizes, you can add breakpoints at different locations. The content and graphics will rearrange themselves around these points to match the screen resolution.
Responsive website development requires a mobile-first approach. It means designing for smartphones before designing for personal computers. This mechanism makes pages display swiftly on mobile screens.
Developers need to make some changes in web designs to make them mobile-friendly. The styles and display of elements changes when the width gets larger. Insert breakpoints and decide what happens to the content at each of them.
6. Flexible Images:
In developing responsive websites, you need to be extra careful with the images. There are multiple techniques for resizing the images. The best one in this regards is to use CSS’s max-width approach. Every image will upload in its original size on the screen. When the screen size becomes narrow the image will also become narrow.
The maximum width of the image is set to 100%. So, it will display 100% per the screen or browser width. The CSS guides the relative size. Developers have to make sure that no other image style override the max-width style.
While designing mobile-friendly websites, consider the image resolution, image size and download times. If the original size of the image is meant for larger screens than it will take extra space and slow the download time.
7. Navigation and Engagement:
No matter what your business is. Most of the visitors will navigate the website on mobile screens. Therefore, make the navigation bar and menu sections easier to view on small screens. A simple drop-down section or scrollable tabs can create a mobile-friendly website from a navigation perspective.
The layout of content must assist in user engagements. If you want people to click on the ‘contact us‘ button, then don’t bury it down below on the web page. Make sure that the purpose of your business, services and CTA buttons appear in front of visitors.
Also Read: Need For Responsive Web Design
Why Businesses Need a Responsive Website:
The era of designing websites for single screen resolution is gone now. People browse web pages on a multitude of devices and browsers. Although it is nearly impossible to design a website for every single screen size on the earth, however, you can create a responsive website for popular devices.
There are nearly 6 billion mobile phone users in the world. This number is way above the count of PC users. Most of the traffic to business websites comes from mobile devices. Therefore, it only makes sense to create a mobile-friendly website.
The mobile-first approach is popular among developers in 2021. A responsive web design is developed first for a mobile device and then for a PC. The contents are arranged to provide an excellent user interface to mobile users.
Responsive websites are future friendly. In the process of responsive website development, the developer acknowledges the unpredictability of the technology world. There was a time when television screens were only 37 cm wide. Now we have 45 inches wide smart screens sitting in our living rooms. Hence, we can not think of what a smart gadget will look like 5 years from now. Nonetheless, we can make our web content ready for the change.
Optimize Your Website for Mobile-Friendly Version:
Steve Jobs invented the iPhone in 2007. It changed the way we surf the internet. The smartphone led revolution took the world by a storm. Today we use our phones to entertain ourselves, socialize with people, shop from our favourite outlet and order food. Essentially, cell phones are controlling our actions and behaviour in every way.
Business owners understand that a great chunk of their targeted audience consists of mobile users. Therefore, they opt for a mobile-first approach to website development.
A mobile-friendly version of websites increases user engagement on business web pages.
Here are 5 ways of optimizing a website for mobile devices:
1. Pick A Mobile Responsive WordPress Theme:
Chooses responsive WordPress themes for your business website. It will make sure that the site renders properly on different browsers and screen sizes. Moreover, the best responsive website theme will let you do some additional configuration for making the site mobile friendly.
2. Choose a Genuine Web Host:
Choosing a reliable web host is a mobile-first optimization of the website. As a business owner, you should host that guarantees high performance with minimum downtime. This will make your website load faster on mobile devices saving visitors from frustration. However, make sure you stay within the budget while choosing a web hosting plan.
3. Optimize Loading Time:
As mentioned earlier, the speed of a website is important for its user experience. Try to improve loading times by compressing your images, minifying codes and keeping all the settings of the website up to date. Moreover, you can also use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) which delivers files by a series of servers. Resultantly, loading times are balanced out while reducing bandwidth usage.
You can periodically test your website’s loading time using mobile speed tools. Keep your settings up to date to stay in high rankings of search engine.
4. Design Appropriate Pop-Ups for Mobile Devices:
Pop-Ups are an effective way of increasing conversion rates on your website. However, obnoxious and unattractive pop-ups can severely impact the user experience. Hence, redesign pop-ups for mobile web design. Make them smaller and easily closeable.
5. Install Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Plugin:
The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project was started in 2015. AMP is basically the process of creating a mobile-friendly version of your website’s pages. It removes unnecessary content and media files. The final version is served to mobile users for an excellent experience.
The AMP for WordPress plugin creates the curated HTML and JavaScript files for the website.
Optimization Is the way:
A responsive mobile-friendly website is the need of the hour in the mobile-first world. Make sure that your business website presents its best version on smaller screens. There are numerous tools available in the market with the help of which you can gauge the mobile-friendliness of web pages. Google’s Mobile-Friendly Tool is the best one in this regard.
Essential Features of Mobile Friendly Website:
Now that we have discussed the process of optimizing web design for the mobile version, let’s look at the essential features of a mobile-friendly website.
- Responsive websites are easy to read and navigate on small screens.
- A business website built with a mobile-first approach has content relevant to visitor’s demographic data.
- A Mobile Friendly website has all multimedia scaled correctly for different screen resolutions.
- The responsive website development process ensures the integration of social sharing buttons. All buttons are clickable across multiple browsers and screen sizes.
- Lastly, Mobile Optimized websites make sure that business contact information is easily accessible to smartphone users.
Read More: Artificial Intelligence In Mobile App Development
Our Responsive Website Development Approach:
Vizz Web Solutions has a team of highly competent web developers. We take the mobile-first approach when it comes to developing websites for clients. So far, vizz has built hundreds of responsive web designs for e-commerce, real estate and health industries. We use the latest technological tools and follow the industries’ best practices for developing websites.
Here is our process of designing responsive web apps:
- We start by collecting all the necessary information from clients. Our team develops a layout of what the website will look like.
- The graphic designer is given the task of designing an attractive user interface with high-resolution images.
- Developers write clean code for the website following the mobile-first approach.
- The content (including images and videos) is optimized for minimizing the load time.
- Custom APIs are integrated as per the client’s demands.
- After the website is completed, the quality assurance team tests all the features on different browsers and screen sizes for making sure the smooth delivery of content.
Vizz has hundreds of happy clients across the globe. If you want to develop a mobile-friendly responsive website for your business, then we are here to offer our services at an affordable rate. Come in contact with our team and get free consultancy.
Closing Thoughts:
Responsive websites are crucial for making a great first impression in the online space. As the whole world turns increasingly towards mobile browsing, developers should also adopt the mobile-first approach in responsive website development. It will cut down the costs and visitors will have a good experience on webpages. Moreover, Mobile Friendly websites have high conversion rates. So, a responsive web design is a win-win for both the website owner and website visitor.
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