What is responsive design?
A responsive website design promises best user-experience across different platforms such as PC, laptops, mobiles and tablets.
In other words, a responsive design aims at making the user experience as good as possible across all the devices, even though the design may look slightly different.
Why responsive design is important?
About fifteen years ago, all the traffic on any website used to come from PC’s or laptops but here we are in 2020, where more than 65% of the traffic comes from smart devices such as mobiles and tablets.
Having said above, it’s needless to mention how important a responsive website is, for the success of any online business.
But before you decide to hire a website developer and rely on him completely for making your website responsive, let me take you through 5 important ways to ensure the responsiveness of your website.
Let’s get started, shall we?
#1 Fluid design is a must
Several years ago, most of the website developers & designers used to work with the pixels in order to define the size of any block or element on the website. But these days, it’s important to let the old approach retire and use fluid grid.
A grid helps to define the size of any block or element proportionally, instead of using specific measurements.
By following the fluid design technology, your website designer can ensure that your website will change its shape according to the device specifications or size, just like any fluid does.
In simpler words, the elements of your website will respond to the size of the screen (that is, the grid), not the size they’re set to be in pixels.
There is nothing complicated here. Any professional website designer would know how to build a fluid architecture using CSS.
So next time when you hire a website developer to create a new website for you or to redesign your existing website, you must confirm with him if he can use a fluid design or not.
#2 Prioritise the elements
Since the primary objective of building a responsive website design is to enhance the user-experience, you may want to remove some of the elements on your website that are not useful for the users.
Yes, it’s not necessary to show the same website on mobile devices as it’s on the desktops. The best way is to prioritise the elements that must be shown on your responsive website and remove or hide others.
For example, you may not want to show multiple forms on the same page which anyway doesn’t make any sense. Or you may want to hide the footer blocks for your responsive website.
If you have an e-commerce website, perhaps it would be good if you can remove several promotional graphics or list of categories. The idea is to let your users focus on what’s important (for you & the customers) and ignore the rest.
Again, you can seek advice from your website designer who can help you to hide the elements for your responsive website through CSS.
#3 Image optimization
While it’s true that an image says thousand words but at the same time too many images can be overwhelming for the users.
For any website to be fully responsive, image optimization is a must thing. There are 2 most important things to be taken care of when we talk about image optimization:
- The images must be optimized for the loading speed.
- The images must have optimized sizes/dimensions irrespective of their sizes on the desktops.
Why image optimization is important for a website’s responsiveness?
If your webpages take more than 3 seconds to load on users’ device, you may face a high bounce rate. Believe me, device users have the least patience when it comes to the loading speed.
There are several ways in which your website developer can help you to optimize the images on your website. For example, your developer can either reduce the size/dimensions of your high-resolution images or he can install an image optimization plugin.
#4 Take care of touchscreen
Given the fact that not only mobile phones, but these days many laptops also come with touchscreen feature, it has become even more important than ever to build a website that focuses on enabling the users to touch the important elements easily.
A true responsive website must enable the users to touch important CTA (call-to-action) elements like button and links easily with their fingers or thumbs. Which mean that your website designer will have to ensure that all the buttons and fonts of your website have optimal size on mobile devices too.
Failing to do so may affect the user-experience and thereby leading to a low conversion rate.
To sum up, a responsive website doesn’t only mean that it should look good on mobiles & tablets, but it must also enable the users to touch and navigate through the webpages hassle-free.
#5 Prefer pre-designed themes
Last but not the least, you must always prefer to use a pre-designed theme for your website development.
Why?
Because with a pre-designed theme, you will get to know the final look of your responsive website and can play around it (through a demo) to feel how it will render the webpages for your mobile device users.
Especially, if your website maker has used WordPress to build your website, you can have hundreds of theme options to choose from.
Below are some other benefits of using a prebuilt theme:
- You can get an attractive theme for your website for less than $75.
- Most of the themes are tested for different browsers. In other words, they are browser-compatible.
- Most of the themes are SEO-friendly.
- You can change the design of your website by just switching over the theme.