Building the best responsive website
A responsive website is a website that is designed and developed to adapt and adjust to various screen sizes and devices, providing users with an optimal viewing experience. In other words, a responsive website is designed to ensure that the content and layout of the website remains consistent and readable across different devices, such as desktops, tablets, and mobile phones.
Now that we know what it means, lets talk about why you should care about it…
It is important to make sure your website is responsive because more and more people are accessing the internet through their mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. A responsive website will adapt to the screen size of the device being used to access it, ensuring that the content and design elements are displayed correctly and the user has a positive experience. A responsive website also helps with search engine optimization (SEO), as Google favors mobile-friendly websites in their search results. Finally, having a responsive website means that you do not need to maintain multiple versions of your website for different devices, saving time and effort in the long run.
Google will care if your website is responsive or not…
Yes, Google does penalize websites that are not responsive. In fact, since 2015, Google has been using mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal in its search algorithm. This means that if your website is not responsive and not optimized for mobile devices, it may rank lower in search results on mobile devices, leading to a decrease in traffic and visibility. Google wants to provide the best user experience to its users, and a responsive website is part of that experience.
This information can be found on Google’s Webmasters Blog, where they announced the mobile-friendly update back in 2015. They also have a Mobile-Friendly Test tool that allows website owners to check if their website is mobile-friendly.
3 basic things required for a responsive web design
- Flexible layout: The layout of the website should be able to adapt to different screen sizes and resolutions, ensuring that the content is displayed properly across all devices.
- Flexible media: Images, videos, and other media used on the website should be able to resize and adjust according to the size of the device screen.
- Media queries: These are code snippets that enable the website to detect the screen size and adjust the layout and media accordingly. They allow the website to respond to different screen sizes and provide the best possible user experience.
How to design a responsive website and things to watch out for…
The best way to achieve a responsive design is through a combination of flexible grids, images and media queries. Flexible grids use relative units such as percentages instead of fixed units such as pixels to define the size of elements on a webpage. This ensures that the layout of the webpage adapts to different screen sizes. Images can also be made responsive by using the “max-width: 100%” property in CSS, which ensures that images scale down proportionally with the width of the screen. Finally, media queries allow developers to apply different CSS rules based on the screen size and orientation, ensuring that the design looks good on all devices.
At Netware Studio, we always design every website to be responsive without any extra charge. We believe that responsive design is an essential part of creating a modern website, just like SEO. Our team of expert designers and developers use the latest techniques and technologies to ensure that your website is responsive, fast and easy to use on any device. Contact us today to find out more.
