Best Practices For Making Responsive Design Look Nice on Your Site

Designing a website featuring a respective layout has become a necessity that is hard to ignore. In fact, after the release of Google’s mobile-friendly algorithm the demand for responsive web design has increased to a great extent. But remember that, a responsive design is more than compressing and expanding. A correct respective web design is one that makes a website accessible on countless devices based on the width of the screen of the device.

Besides, there are many key considerations that you will have to take into account when creating a responsive site: what you should add or remove? How can you set priorities for the most important things and so on. Put it simply, building a responsive site requires expertise and good coding skills. Below are a few best practices following which will help you create a nice-looking responsive design for your website:

1. Create a Responsive Design Focusing on Different Layouts

While you may choose to present the complete content of your website for desktop users, it’s imperative that you should keep the layout simple for small screen devices.
Essentially, when viewing a site using the desktop computer, users normally want access to detailed information. However, users viewing a site on smaller screens are more concerned with quickly accessing the most important content of the site instead of having to go through all the details.

And so, make sure to design your responsive design according to the device that the users are using to access your site. Since the majority of users prefer to surf the Internet via their handheld cell phones, it is imperative that your website layout should be as simple as possible. One best way to achieve this objective is to hide the navigation menus of your site.

Hiding the navigation menus of your site for small screen devices helps in keeping the layout simple and easy to understand. In order to hide the menu option, you can use an icon or any symbol – that helps indicate users about squeezing or stretching the menu.

2. Concentrate on Defining Breakpoints

The second important practice you need to consider is to pay attention to defining the breakpoints. The resolution of the responsive design is defined in terms of breakpoints. Essentially, breakpoints in a responsive design are browser width – declared by Media Queries – that change the website layout after the browser is in the declared range.

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There are many different sizes you need to consider when adding breakpoints, but there a few sizes that requires more attention than any other sizes, such as:

320px and 480px: Both of these sizes are usually applied to Smartphones of the small size, in general, the older version of Smartphones.
768px: This is an ideal size to be applied to large-size Smartphones and tablets.
1024px: 1024px or higher is the perfect size for creating a desktop website.

3. Create a Fine Balance Between Font Weights and Sizes

Creating a fine balance between the headers and paragraph text of the design is very important. This is because while larger headers will look great on a larger display, they won’t look good on the smaller mobile screens especially when they’re stretched over a few lines. And so, make sure that font weights and sizes in the design are resized appropriately.

The new range of mobile devices boasts high-resolution screens, making text easier to read. While you must set font weights and sizes a little bit smaller on mobile device screens, it is advised that font sizes must be increased for a larger display.

4. Make Your Images Fluid

One of the most common concerns that the majority of web designers face when creating a fully-responsive design is making the images flexible to adjust to any device screen. Most importantly, sizing the images for mobile users is the best practice to create a responsive design, if you want your site to load quickly, which is crucial for the success of the website.

Bear in mind the more simple your design will be, the easier it will become to create flexible images.

While there are many different ways that can help in making your images fluid and adjust to fit any screen size, however, the easiest methods to achieve such an objective is through adaptive sizing and resizing the width of images. Besides this, you can also consider using variable breakpoints and place many different image sizes within your data for multiple screen resolutions; but this method can create an issue in terms of bandwidth usage. Well, you cannot create a responsive website, making an assumption that all of your site visitors will have access to better bandwidth.

5. Place Important Information On the Top Of Design For Mobile Screens

Lastly, it is recommended that you must put your important information, including your contact details, call to actions (like buy now), etc. at the extreme top of your mobile design. Ideally, mobile users wish to have quick access to information, but following the practice to put important details on the top will work well on any device as well.

For example, it is good to place an “Add to Cart” button on the top of on the product details page of an e-commerce site, as it saves users from the hassle of scrolling down the page.

Conclusion

Are you a novice web designer and want to learn strategies that help in making your responsive design look good on a website? In that case, reading the above mentioned important responsive design practices will definitely to achieve your desired goal in the most efficient manner possible.

Author Biography:

Samuel Dawson is a intuitive professional in Designs2HTML Ltd- which convert psd to wordpress with extensive results. Samuel is here from the very beginning and working as Front Developer at senior level.