DEV Community

Mary Williams
Mary Williams

Posted on

Top 16 Things To Consider While Planning To Build Responsive WebSite

Amazing technological advancements made in recent times have changed our lives for good. Most notable are the smart devices of different sizes like smartphone or smart television. You can utilize smart devices for connecting to net and browsing online content. The condition is that the website should be adaptive to different screen sizes without distorting the content. Responsive web development can help in creating such sites.  Responsive web application improves the aesthetics of sites and allow seamless functioning across devices. The responsive design was initially created with mobile devices in perspective. You will find that the site page content automatically adjusts itself, grow or shrink based on device’s screen size in responsive design.

Things To Consider While Creating Responsive Designs

If you are planning to build mobile responsive website, you need to follow certain points as discussed below.

Ensure Cross-Device and Cross-Browser Compatibility
Use Google Analytics for collecting data related to number of times your site has been accessed from web browsers and mobile devices.

Keep Checking The Browser and Device Statistics Periodically
Use Analytics periodically to understand the shift in browsing patterns so that you can tweak the responsive quotient of your site accordingly.

Ensure Appearance Of Key Contents Correctly
You need to make sure that
-Important content should be appearing clearly on all devices
-Supportive content can be adjusted for smaller devices so that key content gets priority
-Font size and scale of content is proper
-Text is legible on all devices
-Pixelated or jagged views are not appearing
-Horizontal scrolls on smaller devices are not created by links or long words

Check Your Site’s Performance
You need to monitor the time taken by your site for getting rendered on various browsers and devices at different internet speeds. For improving performance
-Get large files compressed
-Use caching

Check Visual Appeal Of Your Website
You need to check the alignment of pictures, textual content and controls. They should not be overflowing the screen’s edges. You need to check if the content is getting scrolled for optimum visibility across devices.
The typography of site should be such that text can be read across devices. Ensure consistency of colors, style and font.

Check The Propriety Of Device Fonts
If you plan to use device fonts, operating system and devices should be considered. In stylesheet of mobile website design, fonts which are default for devices should be specified. Fonts may appear jagged if scaling of website is done. This depends on device and browser.
Uniform scaling of font weight is not done by Windows. Mac OS scales uniformly. In Safari, fonts appear leaner than Chrome. The outcome can be adversely impacted by line spacing and kerning. Fonts should be thoroughly tested from different angles and zoom ratios before adding to design.

Ensure Ease Of Navigation
You need to make sure that elements facilitating navigation should not move out of the screen edges. Hamburger menu icon can be used for ease of navigation on smaller devices. Navigation with swipe gestures should be enabled.

Check Popups Of Site
Make sure that the site popups, both browser window and inline, are interactive.

Check Interactivity Quotient
To optimize interactivity of site, ensure that
-Site is compatible with external devices like stylus, mouse, keyboard etc.
-Controls respond to taps and can accommodate finger taps

Focus On Mobile Usage
If you re-design site content or specific section, ensure that the design first caters to handhelds and then to bigger screens.

Check Media Files
The resolution of devices, type of browsers, and viewport sizes would vary. You need to complement the same with different versions of media like background images.
Check that
-Media is running on devices with slow connectivity speed
-Colors are consistent across devices
-Images are responsive and stay within containers
-Correct media is used dependent on resolution and internet speed of device
-Images of products can be expanded
-Icon fonts are positioned properly on various screens and browsers

Check Out Conditional Elements
Ensure that
-You can view sign-up button and input field behind keyboard on smartphones
-Conditional elements rendered with Javascript powered CSS are behaving properly
-SVG animation is displayed correctly on desktop even after resizing
-CSS, image and Javascript files have been optimized for best performance
-Files are compressed, made inline or minified as necessary

Ensure Seamless Access Of Style Elements by Google Bot
Google Bot should be allowed to access the CSS, image and Javascript files of site. Change the robots.txt file’s content to ensure that bot is capable of crawling files and can index your site for mobile relevant results. The site should have media queries responsive design.

Ensure Optimum Speed of Webpage
User experience depends on page speed. Your site’s Google ranking also depends on it. You can improve the page loading speed of your website by
-Using Touch events in place of click events
-Optimizing images
-Using caching optimized for mobiles
-Compressing large files
Keep monitoring the speed of your responsive ui design through Google Page Speed Insights or similar tools. Rectify potential issues earnestly.

Enrich Your Site’s Content
You can enrich your site’s content using mobile structured data through Schema.org. Snippets appear more attractive in mobile devices due to space constraint. Use following structured data for mobiles:
-Software Application Mark-up for displaying app details in results of Google search
-Events microdata for making user find and attend events organized by you

Take Care of Page Titles and meta-descriptions
Mobile devices lack space. So, keep title size less than sixty characters and meta-descriptions’ size less than 155 characters. This prevents them from getting truncated.

If you are seeking help for creating responsive web designs, you can connect with the experts of MAP Systems, the top web design company. You site’s design would be web and mobile friendly which will increase your site’s SERP automatically.

Top comments (0)