Technology evolves quickly, and website design concepts are no exception. In recent years, design features and website elements that were once fresh and original may have become dull, overdone, and cliched. Initially, the primary purpose of web design was to offer a seamless surfing experience for desktop users—after all, it was the only way individuals could access the internet. However, the mobile revolution has radically altered how we design for the web.
According to a GoodFirms poll, 73.1% of web developers believe that a non-responsive web design is one of the most common reasons users abandon a website. Website designers place a premium on a responsive design using the best web design tools. Today, when designers create a new website, they must ensure that it looks impressive, operates appropriately, and communicates the intended message across various devices and browsers. It's almost certain that clients seeking website design will request a mobile version of their site, which is made possible through responsive design principles.
An overview of responsive web design
Image is taken from Strikingly user’s website
Responsive web design is a method of developing websites that enables web pages to be rendered on various screen sizes. This is an excellent example of user interface plasticity—the ability of an interface to adapt to the available screen space and show itself optimally.
Making a website responsive entails much more than merely generating a mobile-friendly "light" version of the site. Mobile devices now account for 55.09% of web traffic, up from 3.98% in 2010, according to GlobalStats.
Beyond that, many users today access the web primarily through mobile devices and want mobile sites to be frictionless and completely functional. Therefore, regardless of whether you're delivering information or running an online store, users must be able to do all tasks on mobile alone to be effective.
However, responsive design is more than a technical method, and utilizing modern tools such as those offered by Strikingly, is the foundation of a positive user experience. Aside from thinking about screen size and resolution as design limits, consider your content fluid, allowing users free control over how they perceive it.
Advantages of responsive web design for your business
Here are some things that responsive web designs can bring into your business.
· A higher ranking guarantees more traffic
Without a good search engine rating, your website will fail to succeed. According to the Search Engine Journal, over 28% of people who conduct a Google search click on the first result. If your website does not rank first or, at least, high, you will receive little organic traffic.
Adopt responsive web design to increase your website's competitiveness and ranking. The more search engine crawlers pay attention to your site, the more organic traffic you may expect.
· More shoppers use mobile devices
The global pandemic boosted the adoption of eCommerce, as consumers went online in response to lockdown restrictions. Given the degree of competition in the eCommerce sector, opening an eCommerce store and making mobile purchasing an option become significant tasks.
Image taken from Strikingly
Website developers who are creating a mobile eCommerce website familiarize themselves with the uses of a shopping software to better understand the process. They construct a single-page checkout and restrict multi-step checkout to desktop eCommerce websites, making the customer’s online shopping experience easy and convenient.
· Improve e-commerce sales
People will continue to purchase products even if your website, which utilizes shopping software, does not work with them. They will simply access other businesses' websites. Your competitors will take up the slack on the sales you miss.
According to a study published by Statista, mobile retail e-commerce sales in the United States in 2022 are expected to exceed 430 billion dollars, nearly doubling the amount spent in 2019, before the global pandemic.
Responsive web design tools examples, and techniques
· Reduce friction
The fundamental goal of a responsive website is to improve the user experience on their chosen device and assist them in accomplishing their primary goal. This goal could be to purchase a product or service or learn more about your business or reach out to your customer support. Thus, when developing a responsive design, the first consideration should be to eliminate the friction that prevents users from achieving their goals.
The primary purpose of users may be to purchase a product or hire a service provider or acquire a shopping software. At the same time, secondary objectives may include subscribing to a newsletter, signing up, etc. You must assess that objective and ensure that any friction that decelerates the process is removed. By limiting the required actions and eliminating crowded design features, you can help the consumers accomplish their goals more quickly and lower your website’s bounce rate.
· Early lay-outing with wireframes
Developing a responsive website usually begins with layout design, and no web designing tools list is more effective for early layout planning than wireframes. A wireframe is a low-fidelity illustration of a future design. It's a simple way to organize your layout.
Wireframes are defined by their speed and simplicity. During the early phases of the product design, experimentation is necessary to determine which options work best for your users. Spend no additional effort perfecting your wireframes. Instead of focusing on aesthetics, build your layout and confirm it with your target audience and stakeholders.
The most frequent devices used to browse online are mobile, tablet, and desktop. When building wireframes, aim to address all three categories to determine whether your design works effectively across them.
· Make the layouts fluid and adaptive
You can anticipate that all users will maximize their browsers. When designing, you must consider the responsive breakpoints of the device and the actions that occur in between those breakpoints.
These responsive breakpoints must be used to reflow the content and layout on a new device. To accommodate the range of sizes, the structure must be fluid and instantly adjust to the size of the screen on which it is displayed.
Fluid grids maintain proportions when the page size changes. All content on the website—text, images, links, and forms—change in order simultaneously to maintain visual balance.
· Design for different devices
Your website should be capable of adjusting to various screen sizes and dimensions. It may be more accurate to think of this as a fluid spectrum rather than distinct categories, as gadgets now come in multiple sizes and proportions. Additionally, when viewing on a mobile device, users may switch between portrait and landscape mode, which you should account for.
A critical factor to consider is future gadgets' potential dimensions and proportions. To prevent having to refresh your site with each technology advancement or invention, update your website and incorporate plasticity and fluidity from the start.
· Improve typography for responsive web design
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
Text and images are two of the most fundamental components of an online experience. Readability and legibility are critical components of a positive user experience. That's why website developers should be keen on typography design rules and terms.
When selecting a font type for your shopping software design, make sure that it functions well on large and small displays. This ensures that your typeface scales gracefully across screen resolutions and sizes. It is generally suggested to use web-safe fonts such as Roboto and Helvetica because they are optimized for use across a range of resolutions.
Apart from deciding the most appropriate website font for your brand, it's critical to ensure that your text scales smoothly as the screen is resized. Users of mobile devices should never be required to pinch to zoom to read the content. Additionally, you may scale the text between several ranges of maximum and minimum sizes for different breakpoints to design your website’s typography fully responsively.
· Try smart load and scroll
Smart scroll is a long webpage instead of having a lot of multiple pages. This style increases engagement level and staying time for the website visitor because it decreases the amount of time and effort the visitor needs to find their desired web page or section. They don’t have to keep on clicking various links and going to the Next Page.
You can have your About Us summary, services or product highlight, USP in your niche market, and contact information on a single page. Still, you can add other pages for necessary information. But you would want to have all the most important ones easily viewable and accessible right on the main page.
Grow your brand using responsive web design
Image taken from Strikingly
The effort necessary to establish responsiveness is proportional to the end-user experience. Bear in mind that users expect websites to function smoothly across all devices. If a website's responsive design is not optimized for a particular device resolution, the website risks losing a percentage of its target audience. Avoid this by investing time and effort into learning how to develop a responsive web page and employing the best professional web design software such as Strikingly at the very start of a project.
If you’re interested, you can quickly start and create your website on Strikingly for free!
