Nowadays, responsive web design is essential. Your company cannot afford to maintain a non-responsive website given the growing number of individuals who use their mobile devices to research products before making purchases and to stay up to date on the latest news.
Additionally, Google’s preference for mobile-responsive websites in their search algorithm makes it clear that responsive design is here to stay. The advice for responsive web design offered in this article will assist you in creating a visually appealing and functional website if you’re just getting your site up and running. Additionally, the same advice is helpful if you’re rebuilding an already-existing website.
How to Use Responsive Website Design
You may ensure that your website is responsive and mobile-friendly by using the following design recommendations for mobile websites. Some of our top suggestions for responsive web design are listed below:
1. Understand how your customers use mobile
Recognize that users will interact with webpages differently on desktop computers compared to mobile devices. To determine why users are accessing your website using a mobile device and which pages and aspects they access the most, think about conducting a survey of your website visitors or employing analytics. Your understanding of which pages and other components of your website should be easily accessible on smaller displays will be aided by the information provided.
For instance, it would be a wise decision to ensure that your Contact page appears on mobile navigation if someone were to quickly search your website for your contact information.
2. First, plan your design.
Planning the layout beforehand will help while developing your website. In reality, before beginning the coding portion, the majority of web designers first create the website’s visual design and wireframe. It will be simpler for you or your designer to alter the template and incorporate it smoothly with your brand, which will help you get the exact appearance and feel that you desire.
Make sure to develop numerous website prototypes and test them on various screen sizes to ensure the final design will be responsive. The following are a few tools you may use to make responsive prototypes:
Adobe Edge Reflow With the aid of Adobe’s tool, you can visually design a responsive website by turning Photoshop files into HTML and CSS and modifying the design using mobile breakpoints.
— InVision. Your website can include interactive prototypes thanks to InVision. With a link, users may test the menus, buttons, scrolling, and more and provide comments. It’s an effective tool for seeing how your website would operate in various scenarios.
– Wirefy. This tool is useful if you want to base your design first on your content. You may utilize a responsive grid and make a wireframe for your website without having to manually compute widths and percentages.
3. Use navigational caution
The most crucial element of every website is the navigation. It acts as a guide for your visitors and makes it simple for them to navigate to different pages on your website. Your navigation will typically include prominent connections to all the key pages on the desktop versions of your site. On mobile devices, it is customary to utilize a hamburger icon and conceal the links inside of it.
This isn’t always the ideal strategy, though, as some users could forget that they have to click the icon to expose the menu and end up dissatisfied because they can’t access other pages. It would be preferable to use the hamburger menu for the remaining links while keeping the most crucial menu items accessible on all screen sizes. To make navigating easier, you can add connections to other sites in the text on your homepage.
4. Improve Images
The design of your website heavily relies on images. They can assist you in establishing an emotional connection with your visitors and help them picture the goods they want to purchase. Because of this, it’s critical that your photographs are optimized for the web.
This indicates that the photos need to be saved in the proper format, such as JPG for scenic or photographic images and PNG-8 for icons and logos that need a transparent backdrop. Additionally, you should use a tool like Tinyjpg to decrease the picture size and think about choosing images that are suited for different mobile breakpoints to lessen scaling and bandwidth difficulties.
5. Think about a mobile-first strategy
A different strategy for responsive design is to first create a mobile version of your website. This gives you a chance to preview how the graphics, text, logos, and other components will appear on smaller displays. If they appear correctly, you shouldn’t have any trouble scaling your design for larger screens.
6. Become familiar with media queries
When CSS was first proposed, media queries were first conceptualized, but they weren’t implemented until browsers gave them official support in 2012. Media queries’ primary use is to enable you to adapt your website’s layout to different screen widths.
The content will react differently on particular devices when media queries are used. In a nutshell, a media query will determine the resolution, width, and orientation of the device and show the proper CSS rules.
7. Include Keyboard Triggers in Forms
Of course, your website’s forms should adjust to the width and height of the screen. You may go one step further, though, and make sure that the input areas activate the appropriate kind of keyboard. You can achieve this quickly by adding an input element to your form fields.
Name, email, address, and other text-input fields should be triggered by a text keyboard, whereas any input field requiring a number should be triggered by a numerical keyboard. This enhances both your website’s overall mobile friendliness and user experience.
8. Make Sure Buttons Are Simple to Click on Smaller Screens
Don’t forget to give the buttons on your website particular consideration. Since screen space is so limited, it’s simple to fall into the trap of making your buttons smaller so they will fit on the screen. But it also makes it more difficult to click on them.
Make sure your buttons are simple to identify:
– Use color to distinguish them from the other text on the page.
– The button should be represented by a rectangle or a circle.
If your button is large, you might want to use padding to extend the clickable area. For accessibility purposes, you can also adhere to the Material Design standard and make sure your buttons are 36dp tall. (1dp = 1px).
9. Boost Typography
You should make sure that the text is readable on smaller displays when using text. 16px or 1em is a reasonable size for body material; beyond that, size your headings appropriately. You should also increase the line height of your text to 1.5 em to give your paragraph lines adequate space to breathe.
Use a legible font as another piece of advice for designing mobile websites. For body copy or menu items, stay away from decorative or script fonts because they’re difficult to read, especially on smaller displays.
10. Utilize microinteractions
Utilizing microinteractions is one of the main trends progressively permeating web design. For the bulk of corporate websites in the past, animations and interactive features would have been viewed as “nice to haves.” The usage of animations has, however, truly shot to the forefront as designers have grown hyper-focused on user experience, particularly in forms.
Instead of restarting the page—which can increase your bandwidth usage—they give visitors rapid feedback, which is especially helpful on mobile devices.
11. Implement frameworks
If you incorporate a responsive framework into your workflow, you can save a ton of time while building a responsive website. If you want to create straightforward, static websites, an HTML template using a framework like Bootstrap is a good place to start.
If you want to create a more complicated website and incorporate blogging into your marketing approach, you may also benefit from readymade responsive WordPress themes. If you want to do everything yourself but aren’t an experienced programmer, frameworks like these are an excellent option.
12. Adhere to minimalist design
The popularity of minimalist design has increased over the past several years, and for good reason. It clears out all the clutter, helps visitors concentrate on your content more easily, which increases conversion rates, and speeds up the loading time of your website by utilizing less elements. It also works well with responsive web design since it can be used to draw attention to your calls to action and emphasize crucial portions of your website.
13. Verify That Your Share Buttons Aren’t Preventing Access to Your Content
Including share buttons on your website can increase traffic and help your content become more visible. However, sharing buttons frequently hide your material, making it difficult to view on mobile devices. Check the share buttons on a mobile device to see if they scale well, or you might want to disable them on screens smaller than 768 pixels.
These Responsive Web Design Tricks and Tips Will Help You Advance
Making a responsive web design is now required. A requirement, really. Responsive web design makes it simpler for everyone to access your site without any problems and can have an effect on your brand’s reputation and conversion rates. You can make your company website look fantastic on any device your visitors use while also ensuring they have a pleasant user experience by using the responsive web design tips and tactics mentioned above.
Markustudio is a Manchester-based graphic and web design studio that specializes in site design, logo branding, print design, and digital design. We love working with successful small businesses and big brands across the UK as a web design firm. If you are interested in any help when it comes Web Design & Development. Feel free to Contact Us.