3 Tips to Give You a Momentous Advantage with Responsive Web Design

Dec 11
08:41

2015

CarolineMurphy

CarolineMurphy

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If you are a smartphone owner, chances are you already use it to access the internet on daily basis. One in five people in the world are proud smartphone owners and nearly half of that use it to access the internet regularly. This is a large number if you hold into account the 7.2 billion people who reside on this planet – that is nearly 2 billion people with internet access (phew).

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If your website fails to render well on a mobile device you could be in thick soup,3 Tips to Give You a Momentous Advantage with Responsive Web Design Articles as you would automatically lose out on a huge chunk of mobile users. This is why responsive web design (RWD) has gained a fan following from developers and users alike. What started as a trend, soon become an industry norm.

This article will give you a fair idea what you need to get started and what you need, in order to simplify your approach.

  1. Mobile First

When designing the look of the website, talk to the developer and urge him to design with mobile users in mind. It makes perfect sense since mobile has drastically become more relevant than desktops. Many designers are embracing the mobile movement.

Since 1 in every 7 people on earth use mobile phones (the desktops users are much fewer), to avoid losing out on the potential customer base and traffic, a mobile- centric approach is recommended.

Designing for mobile before desktops and other devices does have its advantages too. Once done with a mobile design, all you need to do is scale it up for desktops and tablets, thus maintaining the quality of the images and text.

  1. Speed and other optimizations

Even though responsive design has its fair share of advantages, one of its major drawbacks is its slow loading time. Many of the ‘responsive’ sites, load from anywhere between 4-8 seconds. While this could be acceptable in 1997, it’s preposterous in 2015 where the average user expects the website to load in under 4 seconds and that is on mobile.  

The main reason for the snag in the speed is the use of non-optimized images. Use universal formats like GIF, JPEG or PNG-8 while avoiding PNG, as it bloats up the image size by 5-10 times its original size. Scale down the images using popular online tools to maintain the quality yet remain frugal on the size.

  1. Use of right-sized elements

Real estate comes at a premium on mobile screens. Making the most space we have can be challenging at times given the content and other elements. Avoid using extremely small buttons to press, make sure your buttons are at least 44 x 44px for comfortable tapping.

Another useful tip is to use padding instead of margins. While padding increase the touchable areas, margins do not. Margins are good if you want to increase the white space around the buttons to give a subtle look. Contact the best SEO company in Mumbai, if you have any doubts regarding responsive design or SEO.