Just because your website works and looks perfect on a desktop monitor doesn’t necessarily mean it will render as well on mobile devices and tablets. In order to ensure all visitors to your website enjoy optimal user experience, you need a site that is optimized for every device.
But considering the range of shapes and sizes devices come in these days, the idea of optimizing your website to work perfectly on every single device seems daunting—if not impossible. But don’t worry, these web design issues aren’t really as complicated as they sound. You just need to build your website with responsive web design.
What is Responsive Web Design?
In essence, responsive web design refers to your site’s ability to automatically adjust its content to accommodate any device. This design approach ensures that your web content scales automatically according to screen size and resolution. So no matter what kind of device people use to access your website, they can still enjoy a seamless user experience as they engage with your content.
However, building responsive web design has its challenges. It takes time and work to optimize your content for every device. So to help you make the transition more manageable, here are 6 solutions to the most common responsive web design challenges.
Common Responsive Web Design Challenges.
1. Navigation Menu
Sort of like a map, your website’s navigation menu guides users around your web page, making it easier for them to browse through your content. But creating a responsive navigation menu can be tricky. It needs to be able to scale in proportion to relative screen sizes, without compromising its structure.
Solution: Rather than changing the menu’s structure, you can optimize space by creating a navigation menu that’s more self-explanatory and intuitive for small screen devices. Not only will this improve your site’s accessibility, but it will also help unify the navigation structure across different devices.
2. Mobile vs Desktop
Consider a website that’s been created with a 200 px padding. While the website may look crisp on a desktop screen, it will probably look warped and incomprehensible in mobile view. How can responsive web design solve this issue?
Solution: The best way to fix this problem is by using the “Percentage” option rather than “Pixels.” The “Percentage” (or the “root em”, which is a unit of measurement representing the font size of root elements) adjusts web content based on the size and resolution of the viewing screen. So regardless of the device, content will automatically shrink or enlarge to fit perfectly on any screen size.
3. Browser Compatibility
Remember, responsive web design requires cross-platform functionality to be uniform and seamless. This means your website needs to look the same even when viewed on different web browsers. While CSS3 Media Queries help to ensure compatibility across most modern browsers, some old browsers (like Internet Explorer 8) don’t support media queries. This lack of support can ruin a responsive web design.
Solution: First and foremost, you can check your site’s browser support by conducting browser compatibility testing. Then, while you’re still developing your responsive web design, use JavaScript to make changes in the page layout, as it will adjust content size according to the browser window.
4. Load Time
Even if you created a website with the most stunning visuals and engaging content, none of it would matter if it suffered from slow loading time. People don’t want to wait around for a web page to load. Unfortunately, sites created with responsive web design usually weigh a lot, and are prone to slower loading times. This can destroy a user’s experience with your content.
Solution: Conditional loading allows your website to prioritize what it loads. So instead of loading all your website’s pictures, text, video, documents, and downloads simultaneously, it chooses only the most relevant elements to load first. This decreases load time significantly, giving users quicker access to view your content.
5. Images and Icons
Nothing undercuts the quality of a website more than grainy images and glitchy icons. If you want to enhance user experience and boost traffic to your website, all elements must be uniform and compatible on any device. To ensure all images and icons on your website scale properly to fit any screen size, you need to make them responsive.
Solution: You can easily make images and icons responsive by setting their CSS width properties to 100% and the heights to auto. This makes it so that images and icons scale properly, both upward and downward.
6. Touch Screens
Nowadays, virtually everyone has a mobile device with a touch screen. But is your website optimized for touch screen navigation? Oftentimes, it can be dangerously easy to overlook this crucial detail. And when you don’t take touch screen navigation into account while creating your responsive web design, it can result in messy scrolling and a haphazard user experience.
Solution: To optimize your site for touch screen use, make sure all sliders, buttons, and any other navigational elements are large and easily accessible to users. Use a smooth scroll feature to enhance the scrolling experience. Or, for a more precise feel, enable scroll snap so that pages always snap into their proper positions when users scroll.
Staying up-to-date in the software industry is a full-time job. And developing a responsive web design for your website can be a challenge. That’s why many companies turn to business partners like KitelyTech, INC. for assistance. At KitelyTech, INC., we work with companies to develop and implement new software solutions, marketing strategies, and more. Call us at (800) 274-2908 to discuss your business’s software needs and find out how we can help
