Need to Implement Responsive Design? Here Are 5 Tips That Will Help
By this time anyone who is in the business of creating web presence on the internet has at least heard the term responsive design. The fact is responsive design in a must these days if you want your site to show up well, particularly for a mobile-friendly site. This is good, as more than half of all Web traffic is now at least originating on a mobile device of some kind, it’s high time to make sure that your pages are rendering well.
While your web designer (if that’s not you) will do most of the heavy lifting, here are 5 tips for making responsive design work well for your site.
Responsive Design at it’s best!
5 Essential tips for Responsive Design
1. Make a plan – A real no-brainer there, but you’d be surprised at how often no planning takes place, resulting in far more cost and time wasted than need be. You have to be able to communicate your needs to the developer clearly, and doing so will require some work on your part.
2. Write content for mobile – One of the last things people want to do with a small screen is scroll through a mountain of text. Your mobile content should be more to the point, perhaps bulleted, and even possibly lead to the full version on the main website.
3. Visual content – Images and videos should be carefully considered when deploying them in your responsive design. First, having too many causes your pages to load slowly which results in bounces, lost visitors and revenue. Not what we want, right? Be sure you size everything consistently and properly for small devices, and test them once done for distortion and load times.
4. Aim for a clean design – It may seem like common sense but take out anything you absolutely don’t need. Mobile searchers are known for even less patience than the average Web surfer, and if your page is loading slowly because of unnecessary elements, you lose!
5. Test calls to action and button sizes – On smaller screens, the size and visual impact of a call to action and accompanying button come in to play. You don’t want them to miss it, or worse, have the button so small that it’s difficult to actually click (my pet peeve!). Not good. Test religiously. Then test again.
Why Responsive Design?
Most often, sites are designed on a desktop or laptop resulting in content that is targeted for that type of device. That’s just human nature. But more and more, the content is being consumed on mobile devices where the screen size is often much smaller.
Taking responsive design into account when working on your site is more work. But it is definitely becomes more important every day as mobile use overtakes devices with larger screen sizes.
So you do need to keep all form factors in mind when creating content for your responsive site. To do that, be sure to add these five tips to your checklist!
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