Sydney Web Design Tips: Creating a Responsive Website

Change may be a natural occurrence in life, but people can’t help but resist it quite a bit. But those days are gone. Responsive web design in Sydney is no longer a trend or a fad that will eventually go away. Responsive web design is now a standard—it is now a reality that web designers and their clients have to embrace. Please don’t wait for search engines to make you embrace it by force.

Save Money, Save Your SEO Expert

Giving your website a responsive makeover may cost you more upfront, but it is worth it in the long run. Not only are you giving your site the power to anticipate what your users need to see depending on their device, but you are also saving yourself from having to undertake all your SEO efforts twice. As much as your SEO experts want to earn money, they would really appreciate it if you would not make them do the same thing twice for one company. SEO is not as easy as you think.

At it’s full advantage, SEO gives you a better ranking on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP); the higher your rank is, the more page traffic your site will get. If you have a separate mobile site from your desktop site, then you will also need two sets of the same SEO efforts, which will cost you more money in the long run compared to just investing in a responsive website. If you feel like you are not affected by this because you are still not using SEO for your website, then that is a whole different topic that you also need to address.

Responsive Design is On the Rise

As you know, the usage of mobile phone is more prevalent nowadays. More and more people are spending more time on their smartphones. Ignorance may be bliss, but bliss may be causing you to lose money and potential customers. Responsive websites are created with different sizes of screens in mind. Since mobile phone usage is going strong, you should direct your attention to providing a great mobile experience for your clients and potential clients.

The purpose of responsive web design in Sydney is to provide the best experience to users across a wide range of platforms. It allows users to have optimal experience regardless if they are viewing a page through their PC, laptop, tablet or smartphone. Since people use multiple screens to view online content, the content should be able to adjust to respond to their screen size automatically to ensure user-friendliness.

Defining Responsive Design

As mentioned previously, if you do not like the idea of responsive web pages, the search engines are eventually going to force you to love it. Big search engines like Google are putting responsiveness into consideration when ranking websites and, at the very least, the effects of a responsive website can improve your site performance significantly.

Laptops or desktops are not the only access points that people have to your content anymore, so you should adapt. The aim of having a responsive design is to make sure that your target audience and users will have a seamless experience across different devices.

However, responsive does not merely mean a miniature version of your full website. It means that your content may be presented in one column for smartphones and two columns for laptops, but your branding and content will remain the same. Having a responsive design in Sydney allows your users to browse through your site with less or no confusion at all. They would not be struggling to scroll, pan or zoom on your content. Unless a user is desperate for your information, they will not stick around for long if you make them do some extra work before they get the information they need.

Why Should You Use Responsive Design?

As a business, it is your goal to satisfy your customers and clients. This concept still applies to your website, after all, you are dealing with people who could potentially be new loyal customers to your brand. Whether you realise this or not—your website is an extension of your physical business. Your online clients should be treated with the same warmth and enthusiasm as your physical store customers.

When a customer walks into your store, you greet them, you ask them if you can assist them, and you try your best to give them the best experience. Believe it or not, you can translate this experience into your website. The easier it is for your users to navigate your website and the more enjoyable a customer’s experience is when browsing through your page, the higher the chances that they will stay longer, make a purchase, or even be return clients. The responsiveness of your website is a part of creating a great experience that will make customers want to return.

You can also look at your own experiences with websites. Surely you would not wait for a website to load for more than one minute. And, when a website does not load properly or does not load at all on mobile devices, then you would just go elsewhere for your needs. On top of that, as of April 2015, Google considers whether or not a website is mobile-friendly as part of its search engine algorithms. This means that responsive websites have an advantage over pages that are not.

How to Make Your Website Responsive

Here are some changes that you can implement to convert your website into a responsive page:

1. Use a fluid grid.

Back in the good old days, websites were built based on pixels. Now that responsive website design is the new standard, designers are shifting to using a fluid grid. This grid sizes the elements of your site proportionally instead of making them one specific size. A fluid grid makes it easier to size things for different screens. The items on your page will respond to the size of the screen, they are not locked into the size they’re set to be in pixels.

Responsive grids are often divided into columns in which the heights and widths are scaled. This means that no element has a fixed width or height.

2. Consider touchscreen users.

Nowadays, most devices come with touchscreens. This is why you should keep this in mind when designing your website. For example, if you have a dropdown menu somewhere in your desktop view, you need to make sure that it is still easy to press with a fingertip on touchscreen devices. On top of that, you also need to keep in mind that some elements that may be easy to click on desktop may not be easy to tap on smartphones. An excellent example of this is the buttons. So make sure that everything will be easy to access even for touchscreen devices.

3. Determine which elements need to stay.

Not everything from the desktop view should be replicated into the mobile view. Responsive design in Sydney does not mean “this website, but smaller”. When you are creating a responsive website, your goal here is not to be able to transfer everything from one view to another. Your goal is to give the best user experience to users who are visiting your page.

Sacrifices must be made to ensure that the smaller view of your website is not too cramped or is not difficult to navigate. For example, you will have to give up your sexy desktop menu for cuter, condensed buttons that users can open with a single press.

4. Keep the page images in mind.

Image sizing is probably one of the most challenging features of responsive web design. This will require you to create rules via CSS that define how images are managed on different screens. This will determine whether an image will be full width, removed, or handled in a unique way.

5. Consider using a ready-made theme or layout.

This is for designers who are looking to make their process faster or non-designers who are trying to make their own responsive website (GO YOU! Great decision making!)

There are pre-designed responsive themes or layouts available online that might work for you. However, this might limit what you can do, it may not have the features that you initially want for your website. However, it does make the process significantly faster since all you need to do is to update the site colours, branding, and content to follow your company brand.

Bottomline

Pro-Tip: Consider Hiring a Web Design Company in Sydney

Okay, the title of the article is how to make a responsive website on your own. However, at the end of the day, creating your own responsive website is not as easy as you would like it to be. Save yourself from the headache and heartache, and consider hiring a pro. You will be saving more money by investing in professionals. Sure, you may be able to create the basics right now, but imagine finding mistakes, errors or conflicts in the future.