When you hear of the term responsive web design, the main questions that pop in once in your mind would be what is the purpose of responsive web design? Why is it important for the website? Should we adopt it? In this article, we are going to understand and take a look at almost everything that you need to know about responsive web design.
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What is Responsive Design? What is the purpose of Responsive Web Design?
Responsive web design is a technique for building websites in different ways depending on what screen size the viewer is using to browse your website so that it adapts to that screen. This is a great method so that you don’t have to manage more than one website, you can simply have one website with the content you put in there allowing you to present it in different ways using this method. Responsive design is making your site flexible enough so that whatever looks on the web also looks pretty good on small and big screen devices. Responsive websites are meant to adapt to the devices they are being displayed on. So that means that whether you are using a desktop or laptop or a smartphone, the website is going to adjust and change the content and the images and how it is laid out to make sense to the device instead of just making it smaller or bigger accordingly. The idea of responsive web design is that you have a single website for all the device sizes and browsers, where the content adjusts and shapes perfectly according to the browser’s screen size. Its main aim is to make a web responsive site that automatically conforms to changing browsers sizes and has one set of codes.
Responsive Vs Adaptive web design: What’s Better?
Both responsive and adaptive web design are based on the idea of making mobile-friendly websites but they’re two completely different approaches to it.
Web responsive is a web design where the website changes based on a mobile device without changing the features it just repositions and styles things differently and moves them around. While Adaptive web design is something different entirely, When you have an adaptive web design it’s very different, it’s taking you to a specific experience designed only for that device. It may have more or fewer features or might have some features that are very specific to the mobile device that you are using. When you have an adaptive web design it is usually a redirect and is going to a completely separate page or even a whole new domain or website, here you get a specific different website for the mobile version and it would not offer all the features or functionality of the desktop version that you will see on other small screen devices. Adaptive web design allows you to have more control and load faster but is a complex method as it requires you to maintain separate HTML and CSS code for every layout. Also modifying these types of websites is hard, as you have to ensure everything is still working sitewide. While responsive design is ideal for new businesses as it is easy to learn, budget-friendly, and takes less time to implement, providing you with a large variety of templates.
Adaptive and responsive web design does the same thing but in a sort of different way. So, which one is a better option? The answer is, no specific technique can make a perfect website by itself, there are pros and cons of every single technique. We need to be meticulous about each screen size for it to work best for our users and plan and research every method that will work best to solve our viewer’s needs.
How does Responsive Design work?
Responsive design is writing code once to make your website look awesome everywhere. Responsive websites can be made by using HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. The three main components of a responsive design are the media query, the web browser, and the responsive interface. A responsive website allows you to keep most of the functionalities and it is just changing, reorganizing, and repositioning things using some advanced features that we call cascading style sheets (CSS) in terms of manipulating that thing from an image and layout standpoint in the backend of the code and with a little bit of JavaScript in there as well. The one language that makes responsiveness happen is cascading style sheets. Responsive websites enable you to adjust the proportions and fonts according to the size of your user device screen depending on various style properties. It is this media query that says if your website screen is about 768, then make the width of the site match that. For making a website responsive you need to add some additional codes so that your website serves better viewability by making your layouts fluid.
How to design a Responsive Website?
Focus on the elements of responsive design
Understanding and focusing on the responsive elements for the website is a crucial part of determining factors for the successful implementation of your website. Fluid grids, flexible images, and typography are the main elements that play a huge role in making the website responsive and adjusting the content smoothly across all screen sizes.
Define your media queries
After determining the elements for the website, define your media queries. Media queries are the backbone of a responsive website which helps to determine the size of the screen. The job of media queries is to shift all the content, grids, and flexible images correctly across all devices.
Set responsive breakpoints
You can set a breakpoint to pause the execution of the running program so that you can take control of the execution by adding a line of code. Breakpoints also help you to monitor the values of variables and are important because it allows you to take control of your layout where things start to get a little funky and squished which no longer makes sense.
Test your website
The last step is to test your prototype on multiple devices to make sure it is effective and satisfies your visitor’s needs. This will help you to understand better what users will experience while landing on your website and get a good idea of the responsiveness of your website from the menu, images, texts, fonts, etc. on various devices.
Benefits of Adopting Responsive Design
Flexible layout
Web responsive adapts a flexible layout that adjusts to different screen sizes accordingly, so you can save your time by avoiding creating multiple layouts for different screens. It is an easy-to-learn method as compared to other web design techniques. Responsive web design allows designers to build a single platform where the audience can view the exact content across different devices by providing them flexibility and retaining the appearance of your content. It provides a platform where developers can edit all the desktop mobile sites in the same place resulting in improving accessibility. Gone are the days when you had to edit a separate mobile site.
Cost and time effective
Adapting a responsive website lowers your development cost and time. Responsive web design provides a single platform where you can edit all your desktop mobile sites. Desktop and mobile sites are now the same, you can simply convert your desktop website into responsive. Since it provides a single platform to build content for various screen sizes it saves a lot of time and money. For example – Some companies, instead of building a responsive website, decide to build a different version for mobile or opt to build a mobile app which costs them a lot. Instead of designing a separate website for mobile users simply select a mobile responsive theme so you will only have to work on one project and only have one URL. If you create separate sites for the desktop, android, iPhone, iPad, or other tablets it would get very expensive. With responsive design, you only have to create a single website.
Improved SEO
Responsive web design helps businesses to increase search engine visibility which means your websites will become more visible in search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. This is because responsive web design makes your website mobile-friendly for users to read and navigate the site with ease. Google recommends responsive web design and gives these responsive websites more advantage by ranking them higher. Google notoriously wants what’s best for their users and responsive web design is a great way towards that goal. Responsive web design also helps save Google its time by crawling fewer sites. In return, this improvement in crawling efficiency will help Google crawl your sites faster and more frequently.
Lowers bounce rates
Adapting a responsive web design website results in lower bounce rates and higher conversion rates. Bounce rates are a term used for analyzing the percentage of consumers landing on your site and then leaving after viewing the home page without proceeding to any further pages. The responsive layout offers an improved user experience which will result in visitors spending greater time on site. A responsive website focuses on the look, the feel, and the design of your site so that the customers spend more time on your website while having a great user experience. If the bounce rate of your website is low this will result in improved conversations which means that the visitors are repeating and spending more time on your site which will help your websites to rank higher. A responsive website flexibly adapts its layout to reflect into the user’s device. This means responsive websites can deliver better customer engagement and conversion rates to mobile users.
Ease of management
A responsive website is easier to manage. If you have two different websites for desktop and mobile, it will take you more time in the process as you have to study two different analytics for making the sites function better. But responsive websites have only one analytics which you can study for improving your site even more. Having a single website that provides a great user experience across many devices is far easier to manage than creating a separate website for different devices and screen sizes. Also, having different websites requires different SEO campaigns which is time-consuming and relatively difficult to manage. Hence, a responsive website is really simple and convenient to manage especially for new businesses who want to save their valuable time and want to give more attention to other important subjects.
Adapt future devices
Responsive web design websites have fluid layouts which help to modify the size of the template to adapt to every screen size perfectly making the website display the content properly on every future device. Responsive web design renders the content and pages on all devices by modifying the screen on all big and small screens and even adapts to the screen of the future devices automatically.
Reduced load times
Users don’t want to spend much time checking content on a single site. If consumers who want some information are checking your website for some particular content, and the site is taking more than 3 seconds and not responding quickly then there is a strong chance that your customer may get frustrated and want to switch to any other competitors’ websites. A responsive website uses modern techniques like caching and vector graphics which helps the website to load your content quickly while reducing the confusion of visitors to navigate easily in less time keeping the customers satisfied and improving the user experience.
Increases in mobile traffic
A report says that more than half of the traffic came from mobile users. Mobile audience is increasing day by day. In order to reach this type of audience, you need to design your website in such a way that satisfies small screen users too. It is the main key point of responsive web design to adapt the content according to different screen sizes so that it looks great on all types of devices. Users want to be able to access information from anywhere at any time. Responsive websites allow developers to create a mobile version of their current desktop website to appeal to a wide audience. The key to marketing success is to adopt a design method that helps you to grow where your customers reside online. If your website doesn’t display correctly on your mobile devices you will not only lose your customers but you will lose sales. A responsive web design website will appeal to all people no matter what device they are using or where they are accessing the device from.
More social media sharing
Flexible layouts improve the user experience of the visitors and encourage them to share your content even more. Also, the Responsive layout and buttons of these make it easier for your audience to share your content socially even through small screen devices. Increasing share on social media helps your business to grow and expose to a wide range of audiences which leads to more traffic and more conversion rates.
Better user experience
Responsive websites focus on different screen sizes which enable the users to have a better UX/UI experience. To understand it better – suppose you are trying to purchase a product on a particular website and it is difficult to complete the process using mobile on that website and it repeatedly asks you to complete it using desktop or laptop. While on the other hand, responsive websites allow you to complete the process using the same device you want to use. User experience can be tailored to each type of device since a responsive website changes depending on the display type. You can create a great user experience across any device that includes adding icons to a menu on mobile or adding read more buttons for long content.
Some guidelines for Responsive Design
Breakpoints
Breakpoints are predefined areas of measurement that allow you to rearrange your layout dependent on the size of the browser or the device. So if you have a desktop design with a really wide layout in twelve columns and when it starts squishing down to tablet or mobile device sizes, you might want to insert a breakpoint that allows you to rearrange that twelve-column layout to a reduced or even single column layout. Breakpoints are really important because it allows you to take control of your layout where things start to get a little funky and squished which no longer makes sense.
Mobile or desktop first?
It is an ongoing debate on either mobile or desktop first? How should you start designing? Should you start designing the full desktop experience or should you strip it down to that one-column simplified mobile-first approach? Mobile-first makes a lot more sense because of the widely spread audience of mobile users which encourages mobile-friendly design and almost half of the traffic is coming from mobile users. Adapting the mobile-first approach means that we are going to start from a narrow screen to a wider screen. Now the majority of the audience spends more and more time on the internet from mobile ends. You can even do both at the same time. To understand it better let us say if you are doing a home page and started at the mobile version of it and then switched and look at the desktop version of it or maybe we have to change something else on the mobile site or vice-versa. It allows us to look at the whole view of how every user will experience the page. This will enable you to build a creative and attractive website in a better way.
Typography
If you want to adopt that trendy new typography to your website, you can. But just keep in mind that every piece of typography or font that you load up on a website, has to go out to a server and make a request and come back and that is going to slow down your load times for the users who are browsing your site. So maybe consider a system fault as they are pretty, simple, and fast and if the visitors are not able to understand it on their system it will default to something else making it confusing for users to understand the content. Hence, it is an important step to find the balance between those two and is a basic thing to understand in a responsive website.
Bitmaps and vectors images
Bitmap images contain information and if they are stretched up too much they start to look a little bit fuzzy or if you have something really small on a retina screen it is going to look a little wonky. So if you have that problem you could move over to vectors which are going to be nice and clean. It enables math something like Scalar vector graphics (SVG) but you have to balance how to use those SVGs as they are great for simple graphics like logos and icons whereas an image really should be a bitmap because there is too much information to store in the SVG. So it is important to understand the difference, how to balance them and when to use them is a super important basic foundation of responsive web design.
Take buttons seriously
Buttons are a really important part of your responsive website and getting them right is one of the most essential things in any interface. Buttons are usually the thing that you click or tap on to get to the final page or the final success. For example – In the case of eCommerce store buttons play a huge role as you need to push a couple of buttons to get to the checkout and get you to purchase the goods. Buttons should be built large enough so that it is easier for users to click on them. It is crucial for your buttons to have labels because buttons without labels that only have an icon are way more difficult to understand by users so keep that in mind. All the buttons should have a minimal inner margin which is the safe area inside the button for the label to have some breathing room and to be readable.
Responsive Web Design Trends
Vector graphics
Vector for a website is one of the biggest web design trends that many designers are using at this time. These graphics are super popular and bring a level of dimension and energy that can be a great addition to your design work. As the main aim of a responsive website is to adjust the content automatically according to different screen sizes, the use of vector graphics has become more common. Vector graphics help to keep the images clean in all screen sizes.
Single scrolling page
One-page websites make the user experience more simple and engaging where all the content is on the same page and have become popular in recent times. Adding a smooth single and long scrolling page to the website is now compulsory. It helps your website to make it more professional and user-friendly. Responsive web designs allow us to add smooth scrolling to your website. Having all the content scrollable on a single page rather than navigating from page to page. When you scroll from the top you will always see the navigation and then when you click one of the links it doesn’t take you to a new page but it just jumps you down to a particular section of the website which is a very good experience for the visitors because it allows them to find everything in one place without needing to load different pages.
Dark mode
Over the past few years, dark mode has become a prevalent feature in apps, operating systems, and software. In 2020 the dark mode UI became one of the popular design trends. Since users have gone crazy over the dark mode options, many people believe it’s easier on the eyes and better for battery life. It is also called dark theme or night mode sometimes and this design uses light-colored text and icons over a dark background. It is slowly becoming a responsive web design trend, designers are adding a dark mode to their websites to enhance the visibility for some of their website visitors and improve their user experience.
Minimalist design
Minimalist designs for websites are not just fashionable but are practical also. They are fast loading and very clear and easy to navigate potentially making them great for user experience. The main goal of a responsive web design is to create designs that are simple to use and navigate. Reducing noise and clutter from the site attracts more visitors, as the audience wants to engage with content that is simple and visually appealing while ignoring the irrelevant paragraphs from the page.
Here are some examples of Responsive Web Designs
Treehouse
The Treehouse website offers a consistent experience across all devices. The site’s menu items decrease with a four-item menu on laptops and desktops, the tablet features a two-item menu and mobiles with a one-item menu.
Dropbox
Dropbox is a popular example of a responsive website that looks pretty on all screen sizes. The site has played with some of the fluid grid colors making it aesthetic and readable for the mobile versions. Dropbox has flexible visuals that offer a tailored experience on all screen sizes.
Shopify
Shopify’s website has offered a consistent experience for all, except the call to action button and the illustrations are different for desktop and mobile users. The only difference between a call to action button is it is at the right of the form field on the desktop and other big-screen devices while on mobile devices the button is beneath. Their responsive website has enabled users with 5 seconds page load speed.
Wired
Wired has built a responsive website by providing a great user experience to all screen users. The site offers smooth navigation and simple pop-up buttons to its users so that they get the information they want in almost no time.
How do you confirm that a Website is Responsive?
Testing the responsiveness of a website is a simple and significant part. You can test the responsiveness of the website just by opening it up in the browser and just dragging the corners of your browser to emulate different screens. If the content starts to shrink smoothly and continues to look good as it becomes smaller, chances are you have a mobile responsive web design. To check the responsiveness of the website you can use browser developer tools that come equipped with the browser and allow you to fix the issues you are facing on different screen sizes.
Experience Plays a Big Role
In making a site responsive, the experience of a web developer plays a huge role. A well-experienced website developer knows the crucial areas where the site needs more attention and knows how to smoothly handle complex problems. Creativity plays a vital part in designing an engaging website, an experienced web developer gets to mold his creativity skill and comes up with new, improved, and creative ideas which he has learned from his earlier experience.
Conclusion
There is a big shift going on in the industry right now, everything is going towards responsive web design. Responsive web design has become a really popular trend lately and it is a really interesting approach. Web responsive is an approach to web design aimed at providing an optimal viewing experience across all devices from desktops, computers, monitors, televisions, tablets, and mobile phones. It is the only way to guarantee your website will be viewable across all devices. CronJ has a team of creative and well-experienced professionals who can be your partner in solving all your web problems. Great success comes with a complex process, CronJ helps you by making this process enjoyable and takes all your load by offering its creative web solutions from our specialists. Make your website work as much as it possibly can, wherever it can, and then when it breaks maybe consider a breakpoint or media query or layout change. You should make your layouts and your web responsive to render the content on different device sizes without having to intervene and create some sort of first aid scenario. Now at the end of this article, I hope you are now clear with the term web responsive, what is its need, and what is the purpose of responsive web design.
