How to Make Responsive Web Design Work for All

                     

Responsive web design is the preferred choice amongst industry experts and businesses big and small. It’s no wonder that the responsiveness of a website design has become so important nowadays. If you probe into it, you will find out why.

With the increasing number of people using tablets and Smartphones to access sites, you need to switch to a responsive web design to make sure every user has the opportunity to view your site.

A web designer needs to come up with a design that fits the size and scale of every browser. Without a responsive design, people would either find a site to be bare and bland or barely visible and readable.

It isn’t a mammoth task; you need to focus on the basics to get it right.

Use your creativity

Be it the classical Harvard University site or the fun-filled Café Evoke site, there is no constraint on creativity when it comes to creating responsive web designs. You need to let your imagination dictate your design.

People tend to believe that responsive design does not give enough room to be creative. But this is far from the truth. The purpose of the responsive design is to make the template accessible to different devices irrespective of their sizes and specifications. Of course, there are certain restrictions that you need to follow but that do not mean that you have to make any kind of sacrifice on the creativity front. You are always welcome to make changes in the design or interface. Try it and you will never feel bored.

Don’t lose your brand identity

Being responsive doesn’t imply losing your identity. Instead, your design should build on it. You can ensure this by paying attention to how users perceive your brand.

A good example of the way to build on your brand identity with a responsive design is showed by Enso. Their layout changes a little as the browser size gets smaller; but that little difference doesn’t separate them from their brand image.

Make it fun

Waiting for a webpage to load or finding the next button on a mobile phone is quite annoying. Imagine how you will feel if you have to wait for minutes to see the page or scroll from side to side to find how to go to the next page.

Get rid of such problems and make it easier for users to view the site and its different components. Slide down or fade out content links often work better for smaller browsers. Make the transitions attractive and spontaneous to make it fun.

Pay attention to small details like rather than using text links, you can always use ‘big and bright’ button that will hopefully make it easier for both the desktop and mobile users to click on them and navigate. The same goes true for Call to Action Button. A tiny CTA button is definitely not going to entice your targeted audience to click on that and so you can understand, your website will never be able to maximize its potential.

Focus on navigation

Navigation created for landscape designs often don’t work for smaller browsers. People just don’t have the time or attention span to work it out. A responsive design must make navigation easier.

This is often easier said than done. While it isn’t much difficult for a simple site with a few pages, it’s quite a challenge for content-rich sites. But it isn’t impossible. The minimalistic approach of Time Magazine’s site offers an insight into a possible solution.

Moreover, we are really habituated to seeing and using sites with top navigation and probably this is the reason why designers face huge amount of difficulties when they are asked to create responsive version of a content rich site. This is definitely a tricky situation and the only way you can fix this by taking a robust and innovative approach to this problem.

Use Awesome typography

The most intriguing part of designing a responsive template is that it is going to cater the needs of diverse types of screen sizes, resolutions and devices. So, you have to give extra attention to make sure that the template looks good on smaller devices. Good typography is a catalyst for the success of a website and this is even more true for responsive web design. As the screen size changes, the template and its different designing elements will move and the shrink or expand in size. So, you have to make sure that the typography has this capability otherwise the browsing experience would be that much engaging.

While designing for desktop devices, we are habituated to use large fonts for headers and sometimes, we use a combination of different font sizes to spice up the look. As we know, this might create a little bit of trouble when the template gets loaded in a smaller device. You would not necessarily have to change this for the sake of making your website mobile friendly. Try some cool plugin say for example FitText that will help you change the fonts size as per your requirements.

Get the imagery right

The way your site appears on all size browsers is what matters most. And to achieve consistency, you need to choose the right typography and imagery that can scale and fit all kinds of browsers.

Again, when you choose images or graphics for your responsive design, you need to make sure that they can be scaled up to fit the bigger screens of desktops or down to suit tablets and Smartphones’ smaller browsers without any compromise in quality.

Flat design often makes the task easier for web designers. You can opt for images that can be cropped to fit the smaller browsers. Or perhaps, you can use photographs that can be scaled and resized without any necessity to crop them.

You need not lose your creative edge to come up with a responsive web design. In reality, creating a responsive design for a site is often a great way to express your creativity. Just make sure you keep it interesting for all viewers.

Author Bio
This guest article was written by Michael Evans, who is a passionate blogger and he is promoting MotoCMS Website Templates that help people to build impressive and strong online presence.