How to Build Responsive Websites - Understand the Best Approach to Web Development

Suppose you visit a website from your desktop with a great user experience. However, you get disappointed when you visit the same website from a tablet or a smartphone. You find the website content overlapping, icons distorted, colors exploding, and all you can see is a poorly designed website. A non-responsive website can be a nightmare for any business.

How a Non-responsive Website Hinders Business Growth?

A poorly designed, non-responsive website can take a toll on your business. Let us understand this with some stats and facts.

·         88% of internet users do not prefer to return to a website after having a BAD EXPERIENCE.

·         40% of the visitors claim to bounce back or visit a competitor’s site if they do not find a website easily accessible.

Why do you Need a Responsive Web Design?

Your website design will mark the first impression of your business on your audience. It plays an important role in building your brand value. Let us give you some statistics that explain how your website appearance impacts your target audience.

·         For users visiting a website, 94% of the first impressions are design related.

·         75% of consumers find a business trustworthy based on its website’s appearance.

·         46% of the users judge the credibility of a business based on the visual aesthetics of its website.

Website appearance, aesthetics, quick loading time, clear CTAs, and high-quality visibility across multiple viewports, are some of the important factors for a responsive website design strategy. These factors encourage consumer conversion rate, increase user engagements, lengthen website dwelling time, lower bounce back rates, and enhance business trustworthiness. These factors tend to positively impact the business brand value and brand reputation.

Designing a responsive website is an incredible way to enhance user experience, achieve consumer satisfaction, secure returning customers, and henceforth accelerate business growth.

You need a responsive website design strategy if you care for the growth of your business.

What are Responsive Website Designs?

There are 6.64 billion smartphone users, 2 billion active PC users, and 1.28 billion tablet users worldwide. Different users use different devices. Different devices have different screen sizes, screen resolutions, and screen specifications.

For your website to render seamlessly across all the viewports like laptops, desktops, mobile phones, tablets, as well different types of browsers, you need to develop and design your website with a responsive design strategy.

A responsive website design renders the web page layout adaptable to the viewing environment. Irrespective of the type of device, a user can enjoy a high-quality display of web content, web components, graphics, and overall web layout.

How to Build a Responsive Website?

1. Choose Suitable Breakpoints:

A breakpoint is a point at which the web design and web content adapt according to the size and resolution of the user’s device. Breakpoint decides the exact parameters at which various components on a page change their position, color, size, or other properties. It helps in displaying an optimum website layout across multiple viewports, thereby enhancing the user experience.

By choosing suitable breakpoints, you can avoid the content, graphics, and other components of your websites from getting distorted, obscured, or cut out.

Website designers and developers embed suitable breakpoints within the code. Some of the most common responsive breakpoints are CSS and media queries. The website components respond to these breakpoints and display themselves to facilitate visual consumption.

Some typical breakpoints for common devices like desktops, tablets, and mobile phones are:

An Expert Advice: Initiate website development with the Mobile-First approach. First, design your website for mobile phones and then consider designing it for other devices.

2. Fluid Grids:

Fluid grid layout is a responsive website designing strategy that helps in keeping your website visually consistent across multiple viewports. For a website to adapt as per the screen parameters of different devices, the fluid grid provides a visual way of creating different layouts suitable to corresponding devices.

Fluid grids are divided into columns. Their heights & widths are scalable and are not of fixed dimensions. It responds and resizes according to the screen parameters. In a fluid grid, the proportion of web content and web components depends on the screen size of a user’s device.

Responsive fluid grids arrange the web components proportionately to the screen size of a device. Rather than resizing the pixels of every single web component on a webpage, a fluid grid responds and resizes the whole web layout, to fit the size of a screen.

3. Responsive Designing of the Touchscreens:

The majority of devices are adapting touchscreen mode. Mobile phones and tablets are trending with infinity touchscreen displays. Also, the adaptation of touchscreen in laptops is gaining traction.

While designing a website, it is crucial to calibrate it for being easily operable through touchscreens. A responsive design enables seamless navigation across your website through a touchscreen.

Points to consider while designing a responsive website for touchscreens are:

·         How a finger is moving across the screen of a device.

·         Gestures of a finger like a tap (to select), swipe up/down/right/left (to navigate), and pinch (to zoom).

·         Very small icons are harder to tap on, this can frustrate the user.

·         Overly complex websites can be hard to access.

·         Your web layout should look good in different light conditions (bright mode/dark mode)

·         The keyboard design should be optimum. Easy to use yet not blocking too much view of your website. Especially on smaller screens.

·         Short yet visible text inputs can be highly beneficial.

·         Touchscreens must easily be operable even by users having broad fingers.

Some futuristic technologies evolving in the touchscreens are multi-touch screens, projected touch screens, pressure-sensitive touch screens, and optical recognition touch screens.

4. Defining Typography:

A responsive website requires dynamic fonts that respond and resize according to the parent container width. Defining typography enhances the readability of web content across multiple viewports.

While defining topography you must:

·         Choose flexible yet visible fonts.

·         Size the text body appropriately, so that it is easily readable to the viewers.

·         Scale typography according to the reader’s perspective. How a reader would want the content on a webpage to appear?

·         Define typography accordingly, because the viewpoints that shrink or grow indefinitely can result in too short or too long sentences.

·         Avoid unwanted gaps as it looks unpleasant. Hence, adjust line spacing accordingly.

·         Optimize line heights for different breakpoints.

5. Opt for a Pre-designed Theme or Web Layout:

To design your website, you can also opt for a pre-designed theme or web layout that has in-built responsive properties. There are both open source as well as paid web designs and themes available on the internet. All you must do is pick a theme, select color, define the branding, and choose the font size. When deployment deadlines are tight, this can be a viable option.

6. Responsive Design Tests on Real Browsers and User Devices:

Before making your website live for public use, you must check its responsiveness across multiple real browsers and real devices. This is to ensure that your website renders device coverage easily and efficiently.

7. Cross-browser Tests:

While developing and implementing responsive website design, you must verify its functionality in real user conditions. Once your website is designed, it is vital to check its appearance on different viewports. With our cross-browser tests, you can check how your website will render on different browsers.

Some of the popular browsers are: Chrome: (55.04%), Safari (14.86%), UC Browser (8.69%), Firefox (5.72%), Opera (4.03%), and Internet Explorer (3.35%).

8. Lightweight Frameworks:

A responsive framework is a complete package that comprises a structure of files and folders containing standardized codes in different programming languages like CSS, HTML, JavaScript, etc. Developers can utilize these packages as a structure or base to facilitate web development and web designing. Developers can further add more specifications and components to customize the website as required.

Though websites look different, their basic structure remains quite similar. A framework act as a model structure for designing any website.

To build responsive websites lightweight frameworks are feasible and viable because they are ready to design and comprise simple protocols. It comprises a variety of off-canvas designs as well as multiple end-to-end features.

There are two types of responsive frameworks: Front-end frameworks, also called CSS frameworks, are made up of a structure of files. The backend frameworks include a set of files with libraries. These libraries can be used to access databases, template structures, and session management.

Advantages of the lightweight frameworks are:

·         It has clean and tidy codes

·         It quickens the mock-up process

·         It facilitates browser compatibility

·         It provides easy participation in collaborative works

·         It decreases loading speed, hence enhancing user experience

·         It provides easy accessibility across the website

Some of the popular open-source lightweight frameworks are BootStrap, Base, Bulma, Skeleton, FICTOAN, and avalanche.

9. Easily Traceable Call to Action (CTA):

CTA is the deciding factor that impacts conversion rates. While designing a responsive website, it is important to focus on rightly placing the CTA tab.

CTA must be easily clickable by users across different viewports. However, you must take care that the CTA tab is not so large that it overshadows other important web components.

Some of the Best Examples of Responsive Websites are:

Discovery Land Company:

Discovery Land Company is a US-based real estate developer & operator of private residential resorts and club communities. Its website is exceptionally developed and renders seamlessly even on smaller devices. What steals the thunder is its slider which features magnificent visuals from the lap of nature. While developing/designing your website a good slider of visuals can dramatically improve the aesthetics of your website, thereby encouraging user engagement.

Starbucks:

Do you want to build a simple yet attractive website? Then you can study the responsive website design of Starbucks. They have used the parallax effects in the static yet colorful images of their latest delicacies. It is also worthy to note that they have exceptionally scaled down the content hierarchy. While viewing on the desktop the description is on the left-hand side of the image. Whereas the same description appears below the image on smaller screens.

Other good examples of responsive websites are Netflix, Salesforce, Adobe, GitHub, or HTML panda.

Conclusion

The electronic ecosystem is continuously evolving. Technologies are becoming outdated within a fortnight. When you look through the end user’s glass, you can see a pool of opportunities to choose from. To stay ahead in this race, and to be the best, you have to offer the best.

There are billions of devices with different screen sizes and screen resolutions available in the market, at present. And shortly, there will be gazillions of new devices.

Now is the time. Be future-ready with us! Cubet Techno Labs is an expert in building responsive websites. We have over a decade of experience in web development services, and we are dealing in developing as well as designing responsive websites for reputed clientele. We can help you in building your responsive website design strategy that will render seamlessly across all viewports like mobile phones (all screen sizes), laptops, desktops, tablets, as well as different browsers.

Make your first impression on your target audience worth remembering. A good website can give you a good business, and a bad website can compromise your valuable leads. Why take a chance? Let us together give dimensions to your website.