Making a website is no more about the design only. It has a lot more to consider while designing and creating a website. As per Google, the website should be optimised for better SEO rank, and be responsive for each screen. No matter whether the visitor comes from a laptop, desktop, mobile or tablet. The content must be equally attractive and accessible for all devices. For that matter, one should know how to make a website responsive and take corrective measures.
With the rising smartphone technology, people are more addicted to using the internet by mobile phones. 77% of users in the U.S. use smartphones to surf the internet. However, it is a myth or the biggest misunderstanding in the world of the web, that making a responsive website means making it ‘mobile-friendly.’ However, it is a part of creating it responsive.
Essential Keys To Effective Responsive Design
Now that the term ‘responsive website’ is explained. Let’s focus on how to make it responsive and what are essentials to make it more effective.
1) Create A Performance Budget
Having a performance budget means having a defined speed limit or overall size of the page. It helps to plan the design elements and features to be added within a budget so your website speed and overall performance (as per SEO) will not be affected.
In the future, if you want to have an additional feature or design element or more content, then you have to revisit your budget and see if there is any scope of increasing the budget or you have to delete any design/content/feature.
Check all possible ways and make sure you do not exceed the budget, it may affect your overall performance. If required, consult an expert website designer or developer.
2) Choose Fluid Grids Over Pixels
Earlier, the designers were used to working with pixels. Now they are more comfortable with fluid grids. The grids hold the ability to size the elements of the website proportionally, rather than making it in one universal size.
The responsive grids stay in columns, where heights and widths are scaled (not fixed). The dimensions keep changing proportionally depending on the size of the screen.
If you want, you can set rules for these grids by altering the website’s CSS and other codes.
3) Make It Touch Responsive Too
Touchscreen phones and tablets have been in the market for a long time. Now, even laptops are offering the same feature. As the usage increases, the convenience should be increased too. Therefore, it has become imperative to make websites responsive to touch screens as well. But how?
Making designs and elements easy to be tapped by fingertip could be one of the simplest ways to prepare your website for touch screens.
The size of the buttons, menu bars, images, hyperlink text, etc. should be big enough to be clicked easily with a thumb impression.
4) Try Pre-Design Templates Or Themes
If you are making your website on CMS (content management system) such as WordPress or Wix, you have access to hundreds and thousands of pre-designed paid or free website templates or layouts.
These themes are designed by considering website responsiveness so they adapt your content and make your website responsive for all screen sizes and ratios.
Do not worry these templates are easy to modify, rather save your time making a complete website from scratch.
5) Optimise The Media
Media includes your images and videos. While making your website responsive, you need to check on your media if the images and the website logos optimization is done as per the requirement or not.
To make your website media responsive, set the height of the images or thumbnail of the videos to auto and the max-width to 100%. In this way, the image will be scaled as per the screen size it is to be displayed on.
In the case of background images, set the size as “contain” and it will accordingly scale and fit the content area.
6) Use Viewport
The visible area of the website is known as the viewport. It depends on the device on which the website is being viewed. If you incorporate the viewport with the meta tag, the browser gets the signal regarding the page’s dimensions and scaling.
By using meta tags, the user does not need to browse horizontally or zoom out on a small screen to access the website content in a better manner, thus boosting the user experience on all screens. The viewport width is defined by using media queries that allow the developers to go into different browsers’ specifications.
Conclusion
Making a responsive website is no more a choice, rather a mandatory action that is to be taken into consideration, while creating an optimized site to rank better on search engines and offer a good user experience. If you wish to have a responsive web design, then you should take care of small yet essential factors that affect the responsiveness of the website. Bookmark this blog for future reference and keep visiting our website for more informative web-designing blogs.