You are bound to face some challenges when creating a responsive web design. You should therefore be aware of the possible issues you may encounter while designing a responsive website. With this, you can simplify the process of developing websites and create websites compatible with different devices. Furthermore, knowing the problems won’t help unless you know how to solve them. We have tried to provide potential solutions to the problems, we have outlined in this blog.
So, let’s begin!!
Responsive Web Design: What is it?
This design strategy ensures that web pages automatically adapt to different screen sizes. It, therefore, entails creating internet pages that appear fantastic on all devices. While making responsive designs, you need to make sure that all the elements automatically scale following the screen size and resolution. This gives a seamless user experience to all the users who are using different devices to get access to the website.
With this web design method, the site content may adjust to various screen sizes. In other words, responsive designs enable you to present different, distinct layouts of your content and design to different devices dependent on screen size.
Features of responsive web design
To create a responsive design, you need to know the essential elements of a responsive design. Let’s now look at the features that a leading responsive website design agency would suggest.
- Reflowing content: It simply describes the content that changes its width to match the window’s dimensions. Every day, new electronics with larger screens are introduced to the market. Because of this, browsers must determine the sizes and positions of each element before reloading the page. For devices like smartphones and tablets, it is important to provide optimized layouts.
- Adjustable size of elements: There are various elements visible on a screen and these have to adjust according to the size of the screen. The use of the relative length unit is required for responsive design. Visual elements like images or other elements adapt their sizes according to the browser width.
- Consistency: Giving your site’s users a consistent browsing experience is the main goal of responsive design. This enables users to check information from your website. The main content, contact details, and navigation menu should all be easily accessible.
- Whitespace: The purpose of responsive websites is to provide the readers with a comfortable experience. So, whitespace is necessary just to let your visitors focus on your content. You must ensure that padding and margins do not disappear on smaller screens. The relative amount of whitespace on the screen should be taken into account when adjusting font sizes and line spacing.
- Navigating with ease: The navigation elements of your responsive design are important as the quality of user experience depends on them to a great extent. So, you need to prepare the menu in a way that makes navigation a simple process.
- Optimized images: Your responsive websites’ images need to be optimized. This ensures that the website images load quickly and don’t make smartphone users wait longer. In the end, loading time impacts both user tolerance and page abandonment.
Why is responsive web design necessary?
Responsive web design is crucial, so let’s check the following points to help you better understand its importance.
- Saves your money: When you create a responsive website, you don’t need to invest in sites for various devices. A responsive website design is useful for desktop sites and mobile sites. This will save you money, so responsive web design benefits your business.
- It provides flexibility: Making changes with a responsive design is simpler and quicker. When you have a responsive design, you mainly make modifications on two websites without facing any issues. It is noticed that often you need to make quick changes or also need to fix typo errors. When you have a responsive design, you only need to make changes once.
- Enhanced user experience: With a responsive website design, you can provide a better user experience to all your visitors. Navigation through your site is a smooth and easy process. The loading speed of your website is also quicker when you choose a responsive design. Moreover, visitors like to keep coming back to such websites with great navigation and quick loading speed.
- Easy to manage: Businesses often need to make changes and they can’t invest a lot of time to make such modifications. Making modifications to a responsive design is not a difficult task as you can complete them quickly. With responsive designs, you only need to manage one website and this makes the task of handling your workflow a simple task. Most significantly, responsiveness reduces a lot of the burden associated with running a business website.
Some responsive web design challenges and their possible solutions
Experts do face challenges while working on a responsive web design. Let’s check the issues and see how a leading provider of web design services generally fixes them.
Navigation problems:
The navigation menus are the ultimate directions for guiding visitors on how to browse a page. Mainly they work as a map that instructs users where to go and where to click on the site. The responsive navigation should change according to the size of the screen and it must not have a discrete structure. Also changing the structure for each device will only confuse your visitors.
Solutions:
Take a look at the following points to know how to handle navigation-related issues.
- Try to make the navigation menu intuitive and self-explanatory for devices with small screens.
- You can think about virtual responsive testing on multiple devices to receive meaningful results. For improved accessibility of your site, this kind of testing is necessary.
- Give more importance to working on the information architecture for the site. With your site’s data, it’s easy to create a responsive design.
Rendering on various devices:
Creating a responsive design does require you to focus on minute details which may include padding the elements to the margins. If you are using the size of padding that is only appropriate for desktops then viewing your website from other devices will not be pleasant. Moreover, from a mobile device, the page may look disoriented or shabby. This is another major problem that the viewers may come with your site from smart devices such as smartphones, tablets etc.
Solutions:
Let’s now see how you can handle such issues:
- Use percentages instead of pixels as experts believe that it is the best solution to such problems. Based on the size and resolution of the screen the “percentage” option will display the content.
- You can also take the help of tools that can assist you to test your local responsive website on different browser versions.
Compatibility issues with the browser:
Your website must work uniformly across the platform which means the behaviour of the site is not different when viewed on various browsers. The responsive design of a website includes the use of CSS3 media queries and almost all browsers support it. It also reactively determines the role of the screen size of a device. After that, it renders the content appropriately on the screen layout. Various old browsers like- Internet explorer 8, are not compatible with media queries. Browser compatibility is a major issue and you should know how to get rid of these issues.
Solutions:
Let’s now see how to deal with browser compatibility issues.
- Using various style sheets can help you easily get out of such issues. This mainly works when you are working to design older website versions. You can also install and test old user versions manually which can be a time-consuming method.
- Utilize JavaScript to make changes in the page layout which helps adjust the size according to the browser window.
The loading time of the page:
If your site is taking too long to load then it is another issue that you must fix soon. A slow-loading page negatively affects the user experience as it hinders the navigation process. The visitors may immediately leave a site that takes too long to load and it also increases the bounce rate. Due to the responsiveness, your site is attracting traffic from desktops and also from smartphones. This may be another reason behind the slow loading speed of your site.
Solution:
To know how to fix the issues of a slow-loading page, check the following points.
- Conditional loading is helpful, which calls for loading those elements that the end users need. With this method, it is possible to eliminate elements such as images, videos, and Gifs that require a lot of bandwidth.
- CSS can show all the relevant elements on your web page. This can interact with your screen size and can reorient itself to accommodate the elements you add.
Issues while displaying data on a small screen
Displaying huge amounts of data can be a great issue when it comes to small-screen devices like smartphones. It has to shrink as per the size of the device screens. This is another issue you may face when you work on a responsive design for a smart device.
Solution:
- Choose a responsive table that will help you deal with data display problems.
- Never choose the grid layout for responsive web design; you can switch to create a smaller table.
- Also, you can create a smaller version or a view of the table. You should also provide users with a glimpse of it, and you can also provide a link to the whole version.
Issues with the display of the elements:
Designers often find issues with hiding and displaying elements on the website. Generally, CSS can be used to hide and show appropriate elements on the page. Let’s now see how you can deal with this problem.
Solution:
- Use Media Queries for CSS3 for responsive website design as a part of the media query to describe features of the device where the content will be displayed.
- Perform responsive online testing to ensure the content adjusts automatically to screen size from where it is viewed.
Transforming existing website design into responsive website design
Now, if you already have a website and are looking forward to having a responsive website design, you can do that too. All you need to do are the following:
- Choose the right framework- There is no need to re-design the website from scratch. Just choose the right framework and your work is half done. Choose either Bootstrap or Foundation to modify or upgrade the existing website code.
- Convert the code- Modify the code of one page at a time rather than converting the code of the entire website. This will make the code conversion easier. However, before you do so, ensure to add Break-points to trigger CSS styles and add meta tags, mentioning “ width=device-width, initial-scale=1, and maximum-scale=1.”
- Perform responsive design testing- After successfully transferring the code do an online performance test on multiple devices like smartphones, laptops, tablets and desktops. This will give you a clear understanding of the website content and other elements that perfectly fit the screen of the device from where it is viewed.
And last but not least, take printouts of certain pages to see the page responsiveness. And if you find it difficult to create a responsive website design, you must take experts’ advice and hire the best company offering responsive website design. It will save you time and money.
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