Having a responsive website is one of the main concerns of digital marketing. The more responsive your website is, the better it will be for your business in many ways– it will enhance your search engine optimization and ultimately improve your sales funnel. If you’re wondering…
What a responsive website should be like?
Responsive Web Design approach basically aims at giving visitors a great user experience while going through a website. This means that while making or upgrading a website, you should make sure it is accessible not only on desktops and laptops but also on other devices like smartphones, tablets etc.
To help you make a Responsive Web Design, we have explained below-
Some Basic Ways to Make a Responsive Web Design
## Start with the layout
The first step of making a responsive website or while optimizing an existing website to make it more responsive is to work on its layout.
Many proficient web designers use this approach– Start with making a non responsive layout since rescripting is easier and more efficient.
Next, use responsive meta tags in your html document. Also adding media queries and making relevant changes in your CSS is important as this is what will allow your website to look good on all types of displays.
To give you an example– once you’re done with your non-responsive layout, you can add the following between the <head> and </head> tags in your html code to make it responsive on mobile phones-
<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width,initial-scale=1,maximum-scale=1,user-scalable=no”>
<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=edge,chrome=1″>
<meta name=”HandheldFriendly” content=”true”>
By applying this code, you can make sure a convenient format for mobile screen view.
## Focus on media
Having set up a responsive layout, the next step is to concentrate on the media types on your website. Because of course, different media like images, audios, videos and many more are indispensable parts of any modern website.
To make your web design more responsive, optimizing your CSS and html codes to make different media types responsive is crucial. Your visual media files should be able to scale up and down so that it can fit the screen size of any device. This is important not only for the content you directly post on your website but also for the embedded photos and videos.
For one, it is important to make sure that your image doesn’t get bigger than its parent container. For this, you can add
img { max-width: 100%; height: auto; }
To your CSS stylesheet.
You can also make certain text appear horizontally for desktop view and vertically for mobile phone screen view.
## Don’t forget typography
The point of typography is to make the written content readable and appealing when displayed. Many developers tend to miss this step while creating a responsive website.
Defining media queries for images and videos is important to make sure that such media can be viewed conveniently on all screen sizes. But certain CSS changes also need to be applied to make sure that written content displayed on the website can be alternated in accordance with the device type for a better view.
Most developers use px to define font size but for a responsive website, it is important to have a responsive font which is not possible using pixels. If you instead use rems in your CSS to define font size, it’d enable you to have a flexible display of text depending upon the device the viewer is using. But remember, rems work in relation with your html element, so don’t forget to first reset html font size-
html { font-size:100%; }
Conclusion
A responsive web design is paramount to make a website mobile friendly. Currently, mobile friendliness of a website plays an important role in determining its Google ranking. Given so, while doing SEO, responsiveness of a website is one the main concerns. With these basic steps given above, you can make your web design more responsive. However, one needs some technical knowledge for it and needs to know how markup languages work.
Comment and tell us how you found this article. Explore our website to find more useful articles. Stay tuned!
