What Is A Responsive Web Design?

18 Apr What Is A Responsive Web Design?

Responsive web design simply means developing a website so it looks good and works well on any device, including a desktop computer, laptop, tablet, or mobile phone. Designers use special coding o ensure the website presents on each device for optimal usability. This also makes it easier to maintain the site and to add coding as new devices became available. In Detroit area, Brown Box Branding keeps the following in mind when developing a site with responsive web design.

Prioritize Content

In this day and age of short attention spans, a website user will spend only a few seconds viewing content before deciding to read on or keep scrolling. That makes the content of a website very important when implementing responsive design. Because text and images appear differently on a large desktop monitor compared to a smaller tablet or smartphone screen, that content must appear in full and be easily readable on every device, or it might not get read. For this reason, short paragraphs and simple images are best for responsively designed websites.

Craft Usable Experiences

Image via Pixabay by borisrannou

Because a site’s content might get rearranged on the screen depending on the device, the user might not get the full, intended experience. Developers can use a framework such as Bootstrap to develop websites for responsive design. Even with this framework, the design team should conduct extensive usability testing before launching a responsive site. This step ensures the site performs well on all screen resolutions and sizes, as well as on different browsers and operating systems.

Ensure Optimal Performance

One thing that makes responsive design tricky is the website code never changes, only how it is presented to the end user. For this reason, a responsively designed site might run slower on a smartphone, for example, that might be accessing the site from a sluggish or less reliable data connection. So it’s important to conduct usability testing in a variety of environments, including the local coffee shop, on public transit, or at a local park, to determine how the site performs.

While professional web developers have the tools to conduct extensive usability testing, end users can take advantage of other methods to test basic responsiveness:

Google Chrome

Google offers a free tool, the mobile-friendly test, to determine if a website performs well on mobile devices. Google “crawls” the page at the URL entered and reports whether it is usable on mobile.

Responsive web design is vital to accommodate the large array of devices available today. It helps companies create websites that are easily maintained while loading content quickly, without redirects, for optimal performance. In the Detroit area, Brown Box Branding develops and creates award-winning, responsive web design for websites that convert traffic to sales in any industry. Companies can get a quote and start their own website project today.