A website that gives users a hard time during navigation doesn't click, and might as well be a business disaster for the company it represents. A responsive website is what every business needs in order to create a deeper, profounder impact in the marketplace and to really stand out from the herd.
While the statement, "A responsive website is one that ensures good experience" is correct by all means and logic, it doesn't quite sum it all up. When we say "user experience", we refer to a whole lot of things that directly or indirectly affect it.
As a rule of thumb, a responsive website is one that loads fully with all its designing elements and images, and at the same time, loads quickly on the users' browser. And this further has more dimensions to it. It is the operating system platforms and the screen sizes that immediately come into play and indicate the responsiveness or the lack of it of a website. With most of the web users taking the mobile route, it has become critically important to create websites that are compatible with the mobile device platforms and the smaller screens of the devices.
Creating a responsive design means building something that is in sync with the present, with a firm eye of how future is going to shape up. The desktop and mobile environments keep reinventing themselves, thus, keeping up with the times is the way to go. If your design or web application fails to adapt with the times, you have ben pretty much below the mark.
• Keeping the layout scalable so that whenever the need arises, you can tailor the website to fall in sync with the changing market trends or according to the new idea that just popped up in your mind.
• Keep the media files like the images under check in terms of their sizes. Yours may be a website that attracts users with its high definition pictures, but you can always employ techniques and tools to truncate their sizes in a way that it does not affect their quality.
• Media queries do prove to be allies, but they need to be accompanied with the right CSS specifications so that the styling of your website does not leave your website loaded with unnecessary weight.
Making a responsive website is a process that starts right from the moment you create the wireframe of your website. The set of steps you define, the software your designer uses, the earliest layouts being charted out, they all leave an impression on the final outcome and the fact whether the website is responsive or not.
But for it to be truly responsive, you ned to have a beforehand idea of what you wish to publish. And this pertains to the content, the images, and other medias. Also, it will prove to be a highly resourceful way of putting things in perspective if you already decide on the titles, the sub-headings, the structure of paras to be included and so on. Prototyping has its fair share of role on the overall process. You can have multiple prototypes and segregate the HTML into different parts. You also have the option to use the CSS preprocessor of the likes of SASS.
What this code does is that it segregates the elements into different blocks. And this lends more structure to the HTML code and keeps it clean and non fussy.
Responsive websites, as iterated before, fetch traffic and retain it as well. Simply for the fact that they pave a spotless fairway for good user-experience, the conversion rate remains comparatively higher.
Sarah Parker is working as a WordPress developer at Designs2HTML Ltd, a leading markup conversion services company from last 8 years. She loves to dole out tips on converting WordPress from psd, and also blog as a part of her hobby.