Responsive web design is a good marketing strategy. Does it ring a bell that if you have a responsive web design, will it be a game changer for your website?
Of course, it is one of the reasons why your website can go from good to great.
Responsive web design enables many opportunities for website owners to give their visitors a much better environment.
Here today, we will discuss what is a responsive web design and also its key aspects.
What is responsive web design?
Responsive web design is one of the best principles and laws of web design, which involves both designing and building.
It certainly increases the experience of the users when the layout and content of a website fit exactly the orientation of each device.
Responsive web design is all about functioning correctly on each device.
In fact, it won't change anything if a user uses a tablet, smartphone, or desktop; the interface of your website content, flexible grids, and images will be the same.
A responsive web design comprises elements that are vital to having a responsive web design. Mostly, these include
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Flexible and proportion-based grids
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Different screen sizes
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Screen resolution
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Fluid images and media
If you need a user-friendly website, then it is necessary to have a responsive website design.
Therefore, responsive web design is the secret to a perfect browsing experience, regardless of the device.
The Basics of Responsive Web Design
If you want to create different types of websites that are fully responsive, follow the below practices.
Flexible Grids
Flexible grids are one of the vital elements of recent web design trends. It allows the website to align and scale the layout with screen sizes.
Therefore, the website can adjust to diverse screen sizes, especially for desktop smartphones and tablets.
Media Queries
It is the characteristics of the website that show the facade of the site layout, including screen size, resolution, orientation, and more.
Media queries assist in having a proper presentation of the website that is appealing and functional on all devices.
Fluid Images
Another responsive web design principle is fluid images.
It shows the quality of the website with a high-quality resolution that adjusts to the various sizes of the screen resolutions without losing the quality of the images.
Mobile-first design
Responsive design will always prioritize mobile-first design. Therefore, the website will be designed first for mobile and then for larger screens.
Moreover, this approach also ensures that when the website is ready for a smaller screen where space is limited, it will also be ready for larger screens.
Accessibility
Responsive design is always about having accessibility that ensures ease for users. Moreover, responsive design enables everything where it is needed without including any rocket science in it.
Some of the best examples of responsive websites that comprise all the principles and deliver the best for their users are
Dorik Blog is one of the best examples, featuring a flawless grid design that adjusts to different screen sizes. The images are optimized, and the content is very easy to read.
Another example is Starbucks, which is a mobile-first approach site. It has a simple and easy-to-use layout that aligns best with smaller screens.
Benefits of Responsive Web Design
There are diverse benefits to responsive web design; some of the key ones are the following.
A better user experience
A better user experience means your website is optimized for all devices, which include desktops, mobile phones, and tablets.
Therefore, visitors will get consistent and seamless user experiences across all the devices they use.
Increases traffic
The basic goal for a website owner is to increase traffic. Well, there are strategies like SEO that increase traffic, but a responsive website is also part of them.
When you have a responsive website, Google and other search engines prioritize your website to be at the top of the page. In this way, more traffic comes to your website.
Related Blog: How to Get Your Website Visible on Google Search
Better SEO
Responsive web design is always best for search engine optimization. It provides a perfect user experience, which is preferable for Google to rank it on the first page.
Mobile-friendly sites are given much more priority by Google.
However, if you create a website using Dorik, you don’t need to panic about site SEO. Dorik takes care of all the technical parts of SEO.
Lower maintenance costs
Maintaining a website can be costly. In fact, hiring a professional to design a website will cost you more money.
Fortunately, a responsive website doesn't require any expensive maintenance. Hence, it will lower your maintenance costs.
Future-Proofing
A responsive web design is a long-lasting and future-proof website. When you adopt responsive design, it can help your site remain effective and efficient for the long term.
Challenges of Responsive Web Design
While doing the process of making a more responsive web design, you will be facing some challenges.
Here, we will mention some of the challenges that you might face while making a responsive web design
1. Navigation Issues
Navigation is the map of the website. Mainly, nav menus appear at the header of your website. If you do not maintain website header design best practices, you’ll face challenges in this phase.
These navigation maps are for the users to let them find where they should go and where they will find what they are looking for.
It is very hard to scale the size of these maps. In fact, most of the time, when the user opens your website from different devices, they might get confused.
Moreover, it will not show what you want to show to the user.
How to rectify Navigation issues?
Your aim should be to work on the information architecture for the website. When you scale it to fit a particular device – it should be accessible.
Your website’s data can aid you in creating a good navigation design.
Also, responsive testing on multiple devices will help you increase the accessibility of your design before you launch it.
2. Rendering on Different Devices – Desktop and Mobile
You need to focus on the smaller details when creating a responsive design – right from the padding of your elements to the margins, etc.
Optimizing for devices is crucial and important.
For example: Using a 400px element might look good on your desktop, but optimizing it to fit your mobile device can look disoriented and unformatted.
How to fix this issue?
When designing responsive websites, ensure to use percentages instead of px or a mix of both.
Height objects like an icon and width can use percentages to give a uniform interaction as you scale across devices.
By using tools like BrowserStack, you can test your local responsive website on different browser versions and devices like – mobile, desktops, and smart TVs, making testing multiple times easier.
It renders real-time user scenarios and shows you how your website works.
3. Scalable Images lose details
Images that are scaled lose their clarity over time. This doesn’t provide a uniform experience to your user, and the image object’s meaning gets lost.
The issue is that scaling happens as the image is stretched and contracted depending on the device used and not the context.
How to solve this issue?
The best way is to crop the image. This means that you add a new value to the image’s width and height.
The image’s height will adjust according to the device being used. Additionally, using percentages for images rather than definite values like pixels helps.
4. Browser Compatibility
The latest browsers automatically adapt to the visitor’s screen size and display the right layout.
Old versions of browsers do not support responsive designs. Depending upon your target demographic, you need to be wary of the browsers that are being used and work around them.
Tips to fix this issue
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You can use different stylesheets while designing for older website versions.
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Else, you can install and test on old browser versions manually. But, this can be time-consuming as you have to download different versions manually.
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You can make use of BrowserStack Live to test your websites on different browser versions. You can sign up for Free and start testing instantly.
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Test on different browser versions.
5. Page Load Time
Load times increase bounce rates. You can have a perfectly designed website, but if it takes time to load, your user will exit the website.
Responsiveness can sometimes slow down the loading of your web pages as they weigh a lot and experience more traffic – from desktop websites and mobile phones.
This might lead to a bad user experience.
Ways to solve this issue
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The elements like images, videos, and Gifs., which require a lot of bandwidth, can be eliminated, and conditional loading can be implemented.
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The pages can load easier and more important elements to the user. Reducing your site’s loading stress is the most important thing for a better experience.
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Additionally, CSS can show relevant elements on your web pages, and it can interact with your screen size and reorient itself to accommodate the elements you add.
Best Practises for Responsive Web Design
Following are some of the best practices that you can pursue to have a responsive web design:
Mobile-First Approach
First things first, start with the mobile version of your website. Afterward, move towards the larger screens, which are the tablets and desktops.
This will ensure a great user experience because most internet users use mobile phones.
Try Fluid Grids
One of the best things to pursue is scaling proportionally to the screen size.
This will make sure that your site's complete layout will align with different screen sizes. Moreover, this will help improve your performance.
Hide Useless Content
Always go for the content first on your site, especially on smaller screens.
Moreover, try to hide all the content that is useless or not needed on your sites.
Test Across Devices
Test your site on every range of devices that users use, particularly desktop mobile phones and tablets. This will ensure that your website works perfectly across devices.
Optimize Typography
Typography is another great way to optimize for different screen sizes. Therefore, this will improve the readability on every screen.
Create a Fully Responsive Website with Dorik
Dorik is one of the top website builders that offers various features and services for creating and managing responsive websites.
Here are the steps to build your own website without writing any code.
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Create an Account
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Pick A Built-In Responsive Template
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Start Editing Your Website
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Create an Engaging Home Page
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Include Other Pages and Sections
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Personalize Your Website’s Navigation Structure
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Add Visual Elements to Your Website
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Configure Global Styles & Site Settings
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Integrate Different Business & Marketing Tools into Your Website
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Improve Your Website’s SEO Performance
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Enhance Your Website’s Features & Functionality by Adding Dorik Custom Collections
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Test Your Website Before Going Live
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Publish Your Website
To learn all the above processes in detail, we recommend you to read the following blog post.
FAQs on What is a responsive web design, Answered
How can I tell if my website is responsive or not?
There are toggle device toolbar options available in the developer tools of the browsers. You can go for the shortcut using F12 to start the developer tools in browsers like Chrome and Firefox.
How does responsive web design impact website rankings?
One of the best impacts of a responsive web design is it enables Sites to load faster, especially on mobile phones, and is more responsive.
In fact, this will lead to a much better user experience.
Final Thought
Responsive web design is one of the best ways to boost your website. In fact, the ideal way to get maximum output from your website is site performance.
Using flexible grids, flexible images, and media queries, you can design and create sites that will accent your content in the best way possible.
Although there are some challenges that you may face while designing a responsive design for your website, that doesn't matter; the overall responsive design is way more important, and it's totally worth it.
If you have any suggestions related to what is responsive web design, share your feedback on the comment section.
Therefore, we suggest you to start creating different types of website with Dorik.
