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What is Responsive Web Design?
A Responsive Web Design is one where the website responds to the screen size and adjusts the display to show the page being viewed in the best way possible. You may first be asking yourself “Does my business need a website?“. Just read the article linked to and then come back to read this one.
Responsive web design has emerged as the go-to solution for companies seeking a user-friendly interface and increased customer retention. Though your company has gotten this far without reaping all of the benefits, you may have begun to notice lower visitor numbers and a disappointing conversion rate.
As a responsible business owner, you’ll most likely need convincing before upgrading your web presence to include responsive design. However, if you opt in, you’ll quickly see a return on investment that makes it worthwhile. In a nutshell, responsive design is superior to previous versions, and you’ll need it to keep up with the competition.
Responsive web design is essential for the majority of businesses and has become standard in web practice in the design of modern websites because it allows your users to accomplish their objectives quickly and smoothly. The key elements of your website can be accessed via a smartphone and appear as a fully functional version of the original, complete with all of the functionality you’d provide to customers on a laptop or desktop computer. If you do not provide a mobile-friendly experience for your visitors, they will simply click away and complete the action or purchase on a competing site.
Unhappy customers are bad for business, and competing on a major search engine can be even worse. Google recently confirmed what many industry insiders have suspected for some time: sites that are not optimised for multiple user types will fall in search rankings. Google ranks pages based on how good a match they are for the query a user has entered, as well as the site’s utility – for example, can a user complete the action that the search engine (usually Google) thinks that they want to?
Your page may be completely relevant to their search, but if visitors are unable to easily access the content across a variety of devices, your site may receive a negative review and be ranked lower in the search results. If your company is relegated to the second or third page, you will lose a significant amount of traffic because people naturally tend to choose links from the first page.
Mobile Responsive Web Design
Google has also stated that businesses with a single responsive website – rather than one standard and one mobile version – are far easier for their bots to handle, as there is only one URL.
If your site is responsive and ready to serve mobile customers, you can take advantage of many tools and useful apps, such as the click-to-call button, which allows a web user to immediately make a voice call to your company. Potential customers can also read reviews about your company or find you in a crowded place using Google Maps, both of which are highly relevant to the needs of mobile users.
Branding is one method for developing a trusting relationship with a customer and keeping them coming back for more of the same. This is relevant to responsive design for two reasons: first, people do not trust a site that is difficult to navigate; second, in order to create a consistent brand, you will need responsive design to produce a consistent web appearance; however, your clients reach you.
In today’s market, there are only a few reasons why a company might choose to use a static design on its website. Those who do not rely heavily on web traffic to drive sales, have few competitors or have already looked into responsive design and determined it was not for them. For everyone else, responsive design is the only way to keep your website ahead of the competition.
Principles of Responsive Web Design
Until recently, web designers created different pages depending on where they would be viewed; for example, a tablet has a different screen resolution than a laptop, so the content would be optimised for viewing on that specific device.
However, responsive web design has transformed the way users interact with the internet; it has created a consistent experience that allows us to view pages on a PC, smartphone, or notebook in the same way. Designers use the same coding on any number of resolutions when creating a site, giving every device a similar level of functionality.
Responsive web designers believe that their clients’ websites should be accessible to all visitors, providing an optimal experience regardless of device. This type of intelligent response to a web user’s actions keeps your company relevant in an ever-changing online market; it increases e-commerce figures and makes visiting your site a pleasurable experience.
In technical terms, there are three key features of responsive web design, with media queries serving as the secret ingredient. These are CSS or Cascading Style Sheets filters that affect the look and feel of any individual page. CSS is a powerful tool for web designers, but by adding a media query adaption, the process of resizing, rendering, and orienting a page is greatly simplified.
The flexible layout, which is based on a grid formation, is another pillar of responsive design. It is ideal for formatting margins, positioning key elements of a page, and getting the spacing just right. This means that a designer is not limited to a specific number of columns; they can use as many or as few as they see fit for the page. A flexible layout also eliminates the need to calculate layouts and text sizes in pixels.
Instead, designers use percentages, which allows them to create each page in a much more fluid manner. Pixels work well in photographic images, but they are a cumbersome tool to use across a variety of devices. One pixel may be expressed as three dots on a phone but ten dots on a desktop, resulting in significant differences in image quality between devices.
The use of CSS or a dynamic resizing function to create flexible images, videos, and other content is the third component of responsive design. Text can flow relatively easily as the containing area resizes, but web designers must use different techniques to spread this across more complex segments. Dynamic resizing allows a web designer to have more control over how a page behaves and to add or remove components as needed.
Taken together, these various technologies allow visitors to experience a sense of familiarity regardless of the device they are currently using or will be using in the future.
When a mobile user switches from landscape to portrait mode, the intuitive design ensures that the page adjusts in size. Furthermore, each element, whether an image, textbox, or video, will resize to fit the different dimensions.
If you’ve ever tried to navigate a website and discovered that it was nearly impossible to do so without shrinking and enlarging the text or buttons, you’ll understand why responsive design is considered good practice by the majority of website owners and designers.
Mobile Web Design vs. Responsive Web Design
Until recently, mobile web design was thought to be far more relevant to modern consumers than responsive web design. This approach sees designers starting with smartphones and gradually upgrading the technology to notepads, desktop computers, and beyond. This method required businesses to have two websites, one for mobile users and one for PC users.
There were several reasons why experts believed that web applications should always be designed first for use on a mobile device during the early golden years of mobile web design. The most significant of these was the widespread use of smartphones and their continued popularity. Companies could promote their service or product to the next generation of computing consumers by developing a platform that favoured these millions of users.
Second, it was claimed that mobile design fosters a cleaner concept with no room for extraneous elements or unnecessary page clutter. There simply isn’t enough room on a mobile phone screen to cram in extra buttons and widgets, so a design team had to focus on what was actually required. It was assumed that by providing users with a clear path to what they wanted, their experience would be better, faster, and more likely to entice them to return or convert them into paying customers.
What users expected and still expect from their laptops paled in comparison to the capabilities offered by smartphones. Designers hoped to build on these tools, which included a digital compass, gyroscopic effects, touch screen inputs, and voice control, to create a modern web design that was not limited by the constraints of a PC.
Although there are advantages and disadvantages to running a mobile site alongside the main site, responsively designed pages are ideal for retailers who want a robust, homogeneous website with plenty of utility for every user. A single site also simplifies marketing campaigns by requiring only one site and one SEO strategy to be managed. As a result, a website with a responsive design can save businesses time and money while also providing a seamless, convenient way for customers to shop.
Statistics on responsive web design
When a design team creates a responsive website, you know it will adapt intuitively to whatever device is used to access it, but where is the evidence that this is a factor in commercial success?
Brand Point, a content marketing company, discovered that visual elements influence over 90% of consumer purchasing decisions. In other words, if visitors arrive at your site and like what they see, they are more likely to stay and buy.
Screen resolutions are constantly changing as new devices enter the market; web developers Spyderweb discovered that in 2010, there were only 97 distinct screen resolution sizes, but by 2013, that figure had risen to 232. The only way to combat this increase is to have a responsive website that is optimised for every customer, regardless of device.
Customers are turned off by long wait times and pages that take too long to load; even in 2009, 47% of people expected a webpage to load in less than two seconds. According to a study conducted by cloud service providers Akamai, 40% of web users clicked away if they did not gain access to a page within 3 seconds. That is a very narrow window of opportunity, and it is reasonable to assume that people’s expectations have risen since this study was conducted.
Although external factors such as a lack of Wi-Fi or 4G can influence wait times, the importance of speed for business sites cannot be overstated. Wed designers can write code for your responsive site that allows it to load elements selectively or even bring in graphics later in the loading process or even not load them until the user scrolls down to them.
Responsive Web Design is important because it can have a significant impact on the number of new visitors to your pages; these are people who found you by typing in a specific search term and then clicking on the link to your site. Domain7, a web design firm, reported a 99% increase in unique visitors following a redesign of their client Regent College’s responsive web design.
If your mobile pages leave a bad taste in your visitors’ mouths, they are far less likely to view your entire organisation favourably, and they will tell their friends. According to industry experts at Search Engine Journal, 57% of people would never recommend a company with poorly designed pages, bolstering the case for a consistent web strategy that performs the way your customers want it to – wherever they happen to be.
Read More
https://unstoppablerobotninja.com/entry/fluid-images/
https://code.google.com/archive/p/css3-mediaqueries-js/
