Beautiful websites are crucial for making positive first impressions for your audience. However, you’ll need to focus on more than visual appeal if you want your website to stand out in the intensely competitive online space. You need to make sure yours is a responsive website that looks good on all devices. And that improved user experience will lead to higher conversions and business growth.

What is Responsive Web Design?

These days, users are exceedingly mobile-oriented — using smartphones and other mobile devices for most of their web surfing. These devices come in different sized screens and viewports. Responsive web design is an approach to web design where web pages automatically adjust and adapt to different sized screens of desktop, laptop, mobile phone, tablet, and other devices. 

Responsive web design is designed to respond to user behaviours and environments based on display size, platform, and how content is laid out on the screen. As the user switches from one device to another, the website should automatically adjust to accommodate for resolution, image size and scripting capacities. For instance, on a smartphone users would see content displayed in a single column view; the same content might be spread across two columns when viewed on a tablet. 

Put simply, a responsive website should automatically respond to user preferences.  

Why Responsive Design Matters?

Researches show that about 48% of web page views worldwide are from smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices. According to a recent survey, 93% of visitors left a website because it did not display appropriately on their device.

On a responsive designed site, content is automatically resized to fit the device dimensions of the user. In order to offer a great user experience, your website has to be compatible across different devices.  

A vast majority of your online traffic will be generated from mobile users. If your web pages are not optimised for mobile devices and usability, you won’t be able to make the most of the ROI of your marketing efforts. 

We’ve assembled a detailed guide on how to create attractive and responsive web designs that will draw user attention. 

Organise Content

Keep content simple yet effective for improved usability. Get rid of unnecessary design elements as they will only overwhelm the user. Organise content so that it fits the mobile screen and is programmed to respond to varied conditions and devices. 

Maintain visual hierarchy, wherein your website elements are so arranged that visitors naturally gravitate towards the most important elements first. 

For higher visual appeal, the overall look and feel of your website should be consistent throughout all the pages. Backgrounds, colour schemes, typefaces and writing tone should be similar all across for a positive impact on users and better user experience.

Plan your Design

It is very important to design your website with a responsive overview along with flexible layouts. Consider key aspects like media queries, viewport and flexibility of media while planning the design.   

Your webpage must include a meta viewport tag, which instructs the browser on how to control the dimensions and scaling of the page on different devices. Adjust content to fit within the viewport width so that users do not have to scroll horizontally. 

Monitor Navigation

Ease of navigation should be an integral part of any website design as it acts as a roadmap to site visitors, guiding them on how to work their way around. The key is to plan out intuitive navigation to help users find what they are looking for. 

Usually, mobile versions of websites use a compact navigational style called hamburger menu designs, with links hidden behind the icons. But this method does not always allow easy navigation if the menu levels are not clearly designed; a better option can be to keep the main menu pages visible on the screen and using a hamburger for sub-menus. You can use colour and text indenting to distinguish the level of navigation. 

Responsive and Optimised Images    

Working with images is a complex area in responsive web design that needs expert attention. You need to resize images proportionately to suit different devices. In the fluid images technique, every image loads in its original size unless the display area becomes narrower than the image width. The images are delivered at the maximum size, allowing the browser to resize images as per need. This simple technique is effective to resize images beautifully. 

Choose Layout

Since screen dimensions vary widely across devices, you should not rely on a specific viewport width for your content to look good. Choose from modern CSS layout techniques like Flexbox, Grid Layout, multiple Column layout (Multicol) to create a responsive number of columns for varying screen sizes. 

Sometimes, simple filters called Media queries can be applied to CSS layout techniques. These make it easier to switch styles according to the type of device displaying the content, or according to features of the device like height, width, orientation, or if the device uses a touch screen, and so on. 

Define Breakpoints

Instead of defining breakpoint based on device classes, depend on content to determine where to insert a breakpoint. Design breakpoints by starting on small screen size first, then working up. Maintain a minimum number of breakpoints. Choose minor breakpoints that were necessary to make the layout seem more natural.

Consider adding a breakpoint to optimise text for reading. 

Get Fast Page Loading speed

Website speed plays an important role in creating an ideal web design for mobile devices. Various aspects are taken into consideration while developing a high-speed responsive multi-device website. These include content creation, content and page structure, viewpoint, breakpoint, styling, padding, text size, headlines, to name a few. The high speed improves user experience while at the same time making your website rank higher in search engine results. Get in touch with a leading SEO services provider to learn exactly how to achieve this. 

Avoid Simply Hiding or Showing Content

Carefully choose what content to hide or show depending on display size. It is a wrong approach to simply hide content for it can’t fit on the screen.  

What your user wants is not dependent on screen size. You do not want to lose potential customers just because they couldn’t find relevant content on your website.  

 The responsive web design techniques discussed above when implemented accurately can improve user experience; create custom solutions for varied users on even a varied range of devices. 

By familiarising yourself with the different elements of responsive web design, you should be able to make your website responsive without major hassles. If that sounds intimidating, you can always hire trusted professionals to benefit your business. 

Also Read: Adaptive vs Responsive Design- What Works Best for Your Website?