According to statistics, 40.1% of the time spent on websites came from mobile users in 2019. This figure alone is enough to say Responsive Web Design is not only necessary but is mandatory. Mobile users have grown exponentially and not catering to them is equal to saying goodbye to your business. Desktop users will soon be outnumbered by mobile users.
Mobile is no longer only a communication device. People use it to do shopping, use social media, read books, book orders, play games, pay bills, and for learning purposes. So whatever online business you have, it’s important that it is accessible and looks good on all devices.
What is a Responsive Web Design?
A responsive web design is the design that responds to the screen size and adjust its content accordingly. It’s an approach that makes a website to resize, shrink or enlarge its content based upon the screen size. The purpose is to make the content look good and readable on any device. Responsive web design makes sure that no information is left out due to smaller screen sizes.
5 Tips to Make a Responsive Web Design
The following are the 5 things you need to keep in mind to create a great design for mobile screen.
1. Consider Mobile from the Start
Consider how your design will look on small screens from the very start. The fact that Google now uses a mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking is enough for you to optimize your website for mobile-first. It’s no more advised to build out your whole desktop site and then think about responsiveness, although a considerable number of web professionals still do this. It’s really important to incorporate planning how it’s going to work on mobile into part of your web design process.
The way your website looks on mobile does not have to be like the smaller shrunken version of your desktop site. You can optimize for mobile. A lot of people choose take the approach of designing for mobile first because it gets them the simplest version of their design.
2. Use a Grid
This tip is for designing for the web in general. Grids are really important because they give your design structure and often make it much more balanced and visually appealing. Not only does grid help you with the visual design of your website, it also helps with the structure of how it’s built and how different elements can bring down depending upon different screen sizes.
It’s much easy to achieve alignment and consistency in your web design using grids. It allows you to easily optimize your website for mobile by just changing the length and width of columns and rows. Grids will make your design better and your site easier to build.
3. Use Fluid Sizing
Another thing you need to keep in mind when designing for mobile is sizing. As your screen gets smaller, you might need to make images or icons smaller as well to fit the screen size. A good way to do this when working with images is to set a maximum width. For example, you don’t want the image to go bigger than 300 pixels but when the screen gets smaller, the image can shrink with it. You can also use percentages in your image sizing.
Fluid sizing is more flexible which is what you need when making your web design responsive. When screens get smaller, some of your elements might need to get smaller as well and fluid sizing is a great way to do this.
4. Adapt the Navigation
This is perhaps the most important point when optimizing a website for mobile. Navigations are important as they allow your visitors to explore different sections of your website. As screens get smaller, your navigation may get disturbed as it’s impossible to display a row of links.
Use menus that serve the purpose without getting the page cluttered on mobile. The hamburger menu, for example, are really popular which compress your menu items into a drop down. It displays one small icon which pops up menu items when clicked. Hovers don’t work on mobile devices so make sure your clickable items work by clicking or tapping.
5. Think about the User
Always think about the user and their experience when designing a website. The whole idea of a website is to give users what they are looking for in the most convenient way. When someone is accessing your website from mobile, it’s not just that the screen size is smaller, they can be in a different situation. They might be out, on public transport or walking down the street. Give them the relevant content and make sure they can read your content easily in every situation.
Sometimes this might need you to change your content slightly depending upon the screen size. For example, people don’t want to download something on their phone so you might want to change the download link on a desktop version to emailing the link on a mobile version.
Conclusion
Responsive web design is the need of the day. You simply can’t afford to overlook it and drive away almost half of your potential customers that might be accessing you from devices other than desktop. Invest in it, hire a professional web designer that knows all the technicalities of designing a responsive website, and do everything you can to deliver the most relevant content on all devices.
Author Bio:
Asad Ali is a digital marketing expert with an extensive experience of8 years in search engine optimization, conversion optimization and
user experience. He is currently working at GoGulf, a Web Design
Iraq company with years of experience of a team of qualified
professionals.