Here at Pumpkin Web Design Manchester, we are Manchester’s leading web design experts. And we work with companies and businesses across the region to provide top quality, effective, web design solutions. This means that all of our websites are responsive. But what is a responsive website, and what are the considerations for responsive web design?
What is a responsive website?
A responsive website is a website that will scale down and scale up, changing the presentation of the content, depending on the type of device, or the screen size, accessing it. This means that all the content will be readable on all screen sizes, all the images will look perfect on all devices, and all the links will be usable, even with clumsy thumbs.
Why is responsive web design important?
With the introduction of the mobile first algorithm, Google is making sure that the websites shown at the top of the search on mobile devices, are websites that are fully optimised and accessible on mobile devices. This means that if your company wants to stay at the number one spot, it needs to have a perfect mobile website, not just a desktop version. The best way to do this, is to create one responsive website. That way, your visitors wont lose out on important content, or have a negative user experience. And your website won’t lose Google rank power.
What are the considerations for responsive web design?
Designing a responsive web design takes a lot of planning. We’ve all visited poor quality mobile websites, which have been practically unusable, and this is because it wasnt well designed. To design for a responsive website you must pay special attention to:
- navigation bars
- typography
- images and videos
Navigation bars
One of the major considerations for responsive web design is the navigation bar. This is what the user will use to find your website pages and get the information they need. On a small screen size navigation bars can be a challenge. In fact several things can go wrong. These include:
- links being too small to click accurately, without zooming in
- menus being hover activated- have you ever tried to hover on a mobile? It simply doesn’t work.
- the navigation bar taking up too much of the page
As you can see, any of these issues will cause your website visitors and potential customers to simply leave. So to prevent this, plan out your navigation bar on all screen sizes. Make sure it is a good size, and that you don’t have too many links.
Typography
Often overlooked, typography is still an important part of website design. And while your unique fonts might look great on the desktop version, are they still legible on a mobile screen?
For responsive design, you need to make sure that all of your text can be read clearly and easily on all screen sizes. From font size 12, to size 22, it needs to be simple and easy to read.
This also involves the actual amount of characters per line you use. On a mobile screen, the maximum limit is around 35-40 characters per line. Any more, and your text will be squashed together and difficult to read.
Images and Videos
For your responsive website to be successful, you need to optimise the image size and the video size for the different screen resolutions and device sizes. A video that is too large on a mobile device is not going to help your visitors at all, while an image that is too small on a desktop, will just look out of place. As a result, image optimisation should be top of your responsive design to-do list.
For more information or advice about the considerations for responsive web design, or any other web design query, get in touch with the experts today, here at Pumpkin Web Design Manchester.