This is the digital era and the number of websites is increasing day by day. To survive in this throat cutting competition, it is highly necessary that your site should be up to the marks. A good web development partner can help you get such websites. One of the most important aspects of a website is that it has to be responsive! Let’s take a look at what is a responsive website.
What is responsive website
With the increasing trends in technology, there are a lot of devices available for getting access to the Internet. One of the most trending devices for accessing the Internet is mobile. Your user may open up your website in any of the devices like cell phone, tablet, laptop, big sized screens, etc.
Your website should look equally beautiful on all the devices. Such a site that is configured to look good on all types of devices is known as a responsive website. Now, let’s take a look at what’s the buzz around responsive websites.
Why is it necessary to have a responsive website
1. User experience
The era is changing and people have started using cell phones to access the Internet. Whenever your user opens up a website and fails to understand what it is about in the first 2 seconds, there are chances that he will close your site.
Responsive websites provide a good user experience. If your website is not responsive and a user opens up the site in his/her cell phone, you are going to get a hammer on your head!!
2. Number of mobile Internet users
According to a report by statista, a total of 39% of the page views are recorded from cell phones. ComScore suggests that 59% of the social media surfing is done with cell phones. So, it helps in sharing your links on social media and getting users directly to your mobile site.
Mobile Internet users are showing some sharp projections and are expected to increase to tenfold by 2020.
3. Responsive sites improve ranking
As Google say for a responsive site, only a single Googlebot has to crawl your website. Thus, it is good from the view point of SEO. It also helps Google’s algorithm to assign indexing properties to a website accurately.
Now, this will make clear regarding the importance of a responsive website. Thus, it is always suggested to have a responsive website that works well on all the devices. Let’s take a look at tools and technologies that help you develop a responsive website.
Tools and technologies to develop a responsive website
Developing responsive websites with the available tools becomes easy and rapid. Here is the list of the tools that helps in developing a responsive website.
Things to consider for a fast and responsive website
While designing a responsive website, a lot of factors are to be taken into consideration. Few of the important factors are:
1. Design the mobile site first
Having a design of the mobile site in front of you will help you easily code it. Developing a mobile site with the design of the desktop view will make it difficult to code directly.
2. Mobile-first strategy
While developing a responsive site, it has to be designed with the mobile first strategy. This means the mobile site is built first and then gradually you shift to the table site and then the desktop site.
3. Top menus
If the site has 2-3 menus in the top, it can be adjusted on the screen at the top or bottom. Whereas, for more number of menus, it is advised to design a separate mobile menu. It must be visible only on clicking the mobile menu icon.
4. Mention exact sizes
Define exact size of your images in pixels like 500px x 300px. This will preserve the aspect ratio of the image and its quality. Not mentioning the sizes will cause color depth and resolutions problems
5. Follow the Google’s design standards
Google has a set of standards that you can take as a reference to design a responsive website. This will help you with loading the site faster and also help you to make the site SEO friendly.
Taking these points into consideration while designing a responsive website, will help your site perform better.