Today, a responsive web design is critical for any business that wants to stand out and beat its competitors. According to a study by Tyton Media, 94% of individuals judge a website based on its responsiveness. Apart from the fact that a responsive website will help you gain and retain traffic, the Google algorithm also favors a mobile-responsive website. It means that a responsive website has a higher chance of improving its search engine ranking than a non-responsive one.
Let’s take a look at four handy tips for a responsive web design!
Tips for Responsive Web Design
1. Carefully Plan Your Design
Before you get to the designing part, you need to plan the layout of your website. Create a wireframe and the visual design before you move on to coding. It will help you translate your vision into reality seamlessly. It will also help you customize the template you plan to use and make it your own. Create a few prototypes of your website and test them on different screen sizes to ensure that your final design is responsive.
2. Pay Extra Attention to Navigation
Seamless navigation is a crucial element of a responsive web design. You need to design your website as a roadmap for your visitors to easily navigate it and access the pages that they want to on your site. On mobile devices, the usual navigation practice is to use a hamburger icon to hide the links to important webpages behind it. If you believe that this approach might confuse your target audience, you can choose to leave the most essential menu items visible and hide the rest of the links behind the hamburger menu.
3. Optimize Your Images
Images are a vital element that can add character to your website. They help you reach out to your visitors more quickly and easily than written content does. Product images can help your visitors visualize the products they are interested in purchasing.
It’s why you need your images to be mobile optimized. It means that you must save them all in the appropriate format. For logos and icons that need a transparent background, the right format is PNG-8. For scenic or photographic images, you can choose JPG. Additionally, reduce the image size using a tool such as TinyJPG. Use images that are optimized for multiple mobile breakpoints to prevent bandwidth and scaling issues.
4. Design the Mobile Version First
If you need a responsive web design, you should design a mobile version of your website before the desktop version. It will enable you to see how the text, images, logos, and other website elements will look on a smartphone’s screen. If your design is optimized for smartphones, you can adapt your design to a larger screen.
Pay extra attention to the buttons on your mobile website. Make sure that your users can find and tap them easily. You should use bold colors and a specific shape, such as a circle or rectangle, to make them stand out. For the size, use padding on the buttons to increase the clickable area.
You can use the tips mentioned above to design a responsive website. If you want professional help to design your site, reach out to Marketing Tiki. We can help you design or revamp your business website to impress your customers and beat your competition!