Responsive web designs are a secret to get favoured by search engines, but the term responsiveness is often misunderstood as most of us are unaware of its correct version. Let’s have a close look at what it means and how it works.
After considering the ratio of users who use mobile phones and tablets, ensuring that a website is responsive is of prime importance. It means that the content present on the website will automatically adjust to the size of your screen. These designs help the users to formulate their website as per the user convenience for a great user experience.
What are Responsive Web Designs?
Responsive web designs have dominated the way businesses try to build their online presence. User experience, being on the top of the online scenario, should be prioritized before anything else.
A responsive website can contribute to a great user experience as it reformats the website as per the screen size to suit it well. It requires minimum scrolling, zooming or panning to see the content available on a website. With mobiles, tablets and desktops in the league, ensuring that each of these devices supports the appearance and user-friendliness of the website is important.
Summing up, no matter what’s the width of the browser, responsive websites respond to the size of the browser and adjust their layout as per the screen both for a 6-inch phone and a 14-inch laptop.
Why Responsive Designs are Important?
Does it really make a difference to have a responsive website? Certainly, responsive web designs lie at the core of website accessibility. Responsive designs maintain the integrity of the website for quick and easy navigation on devices with different screen sizes.
To put it simply, one can’t take the burden of designing multiple websites to suit the different screen sizes, and rather prefer to design websites compatible with all screen sizes and shapes. Besides, the responsive website requires less engineering and maintenance time to make necessary changes. And hence, it is advisable to approach professional web designers to stay ahead of the ranking curve.
How can Responsive Designs help you attract Traffic?
The world is engrossed in the hustle-bustle of daily lives with no time to zoom and scroll phone screen to check particular information. People rather prefer to look for other sources which are convenient and approachable. Loose functionality increases the website’s bounce rate and will drift away from the visitors in search of an easier solution. This brings in the need for a website designing company to analyze and make relevant changes to the website to make it responsive.
It Carries Your Brand across Various Channels
The number of mobile phone internet users would reach over 500 million by 2023 as explicated in a report by Statista. Taking your business to different devices will eventually multiply your brand reach to target more and more users and will build brand loyalty. There could be a sheer amount of traffic trying to approach you through mobile devices; can you afford to lose it? If not, it’s high time to make your website approachable from the multitude of devices, browsers and screens.
It Builds and Fortifies Your Brand Identity
Branding is an important part of attracting clients. A website is the core of branding and can trigger traffic to respond to various CTAs, thus converting leads. Now, users are quite inquisitive and try to go ahead with reliable services. They often check reviews, ratings and website accessibility on various browsers and devices for comments. Approaching reliable and responsive web design services can make a real-time difference.
It Improves Your Conversion Rate
The more options, the better the chances of conversion. And improved conversion can benefit business and the brand in a long run. Implementing responsive web designs can help you trigger user response by causing a great user experience.
How to Formulate A Responsive Website?
Needless to say, Google ranks mobile-friendly sites higher, especially after rolling out the 4/21/15 update. Fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries are the three technical ingredients for responsive web designs. Now that you understand how important it is for a website to be responsive, here is a how-to guide to make your website responsive.
The layout, media, and typography are some of the majors to work on to make your website responsive.
Layout
Start with a non-responsive website and make changes gradually. Pick a default size for the website. Now, make the code responsive and add media queries to it.
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1,maximum-scale=1,user-scalable=no">
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge,chrome=1">
<meta name="HandheldFriendly" content="true">
Paste the above stated lines within the <head> and </head> tags on your html page.
Adding a viewport Meta tag is important to control the page’s dimensions and scaling.
Developers use this code to remove the default functionality and set the screen view at 1:1.
Thereafter, add media queries to it.
“Media query consists of a media type and zero or more expressions that check for the conditions of particular media features. By using media queries, presentations can be tailored to a specific range of output devices without changing the content itself” by the W3C site.
Put it simply, media queries enhance the visibility of the site to make it responsive on all devices. It can be customized as per the website’s layout and has no preformed template to edit.
Media
Properly sized media videos or images or any other form of media adds responsiveness to your website. Make sure that it’s never bigger than its parent container. Insert CSS code into CSS stylesheet to keep images within the size range. Get more control on the image size by using the code “img {max-width: 100%; height: auto; }”
<img
src= "image.jpg"
data-src-600px= "image-600px.jpg"
data-src-800px= "image-800px.jpg"
alt= "web-designs">
See how we use the potential of CSS3 to replace the default image with a specific sized image for minimum device width.
@media
(min device-
width:600px)
{
img[data-src-600px] {
content: attr(data-src-600px, url);
}
}
@media (min-device-width:800px) {
img[data-src-800px] {
content: attr(data-src-800px, url);
Put the code as it is to change the media size. This works for images only.
Typography
Serving an important purpose, typography can be of extreme importance and is often neglected by developers. Putting straight, developers use pixels to define fonts but what is to be worked on is responsive font size and not pixels, and it should be related to the parent container to adapt to any screen size.
For instance, the unit rems work identically to the em unit and are specified in CSS3 specification but are easier to be used. Reset HTML size to html { font-size:100%; }.
Afterwards, redefine font size:
@media (min-width: 640px) { body {font-size:1rem;} }
@media (min-width:960px) { body {font-size:1.2rem;} }
@media (min-width:1100px) { body {font-size:1.5rem;} }
This would be enough to make your content adjustable as per the reader’s viewport. Focus on the user and all else will follow.
Wrap Up
Resize, hide, shrink, or enlarge a website using HTML and CCS is all that a responsive website design is about. Using a quantifiable Responsive web design strategy would make it easy for a developer to result in responsive designs. Hiring professionals from a responsive website designing company in Noida would let you create custom or responsive web designs for a great user experience.
