Responsive design is clearly the buzzword for web design these days, and for good reason. The proliferation of mobile devices, accounting for around half of all web searching, gives added importance to making sure your pages render well on any device. There is a lot to consider here, and if you're not actually designing it yourself, (most of us are not!) you do need to possess at least a basic understanding in order to explain your wishes to your developer.
While your web designer (if that's not you) will do most of the heavy lifting, here are 5 tips for making responsive design work well for your site.
5 Important tips for Responsive Design
Make a plan – Real no-brainer there, but you'd be surprised at how many times specific plans are not made, resulting in a lot more cost and time wasted than need be. You have to be able to communicate your needs to the developer clearly, and doing so will require some work on your part.
Visual content – Images and videos need to be carefully considered when deploying them in your responsive design. First, having too many causes your pages to load slowly which leads to bounces, lost visitors and revenue. Not what we want, right? Be sure you size everything consistently and properly for small devices, and test them once done for distortion and load times.
Write content for mobile – One of the last things people want to do with a small screen is scroll through a mountain of text. Your mobile content should be more to the point, perhaps bulleted, and even possibly lead to the full version on the main website.
Test calls to action and button sizes – On smaller screens, the size and visual impact of a call to action and accompanying button come in to play. You don't want them to miss it, or worse, have the button so small that it's difficult to actually click. Not good. Test religiously.
Aim for a clean design – Omit anything you absolutely don't need, Mobile searchers are known for even less patience than the average Web surfer, and if your page is loading slowly thanks to unnecessary elements, you lose!