By Martha Jameson
Web design is crucial as your company develops. Because so many modern industries are digitizing and uploading their company to the internet, responsivity is one of the most critical elements of web design and can significantly impact things like SEO, ranking, and click-through rate. It can be deceptively tricky to master, but with strong website design, you are far more likely to draw in an audience and hold their attention than if your website is slow moving and your content slow-loading. So, without further ado, here are some tips for web designing a responsive website.
Mobile Design
Optimizing your website design for desktop use only won’t be enough these days, with so much of your potential traffic coming out of alternate forms of search engine hosting. In particular, massive numbers of people use tablets and smartphones to do their browsing, some of them letting these devices replace their laptop or desktop altogether. If they want to look at your site only to be greeted by sluggish ill-formatted pages, they’re going to be turned off visiting again, and may even exit immediately. Get this right, with as much dedication as you would put into the main site design.
Content Planning
You must plan your content before designing your website, even though it can be tempting to jump right into designing it. “Planning the layout, format, and content of what you want on your website is going to be a massive boost, not to mention time-saver, to your whole design project, so put in the forethought,” advises Mark O’Doyle, web designer at Australia2Write. This is an undervalued step of the design process, so get ahead of your competition with some proper planning.
Fonts Matter
Font choice is a subtle issue and one of the most essential elements of design. It is one of the only available tools you have in terms of aesthetic design. Fonts can choke your loading speed. The biggest issue coming with the complexity of the font and the number of different fonts. There are various fonts to choose from. However, many unpredictable things can negatively impact the page. Aim for font consistency and experiment with different fonts to see the load times that you might experience.
Take Care With Image
Images are a very valuable tool for a website. They draw attention and can help provide an emotional response from viewers as well as saving you from constantly using text to explain and illustrate everything on your page. “Images are great for websites…but anything that is complex in the way an image is, so filled with data, will take a much longer time to load,” warns Tiffany Elsa, team leader at BritStudent. Optimize the images you intend to use, meaning sorting out the file type and the sizing so that you are never caught short with your desired load times.
Site Navigation
Having a website that is optimized for speed isn’t only about the speed of your load times, it also refers to how well the site helps the user to increase their own speed as they travel around the site. What this comes down to is site navigation. When a user is on your website you want to ensure that they are able to move about the site with a real intuitive sense of travel, rather than getting lost or having to reload or, worst of all, moving to another site to find what they need. Site navigation is really tricky to nail, since, mostly, by the time it comes to dealing with it the designer is already very familiar themselves with what the site is about and what it offers. This is why it can be really helpful to workshop your website to a focus group of strangers. Workshopping will involve running the website by people who aren’t familiar with the project or what has gone into the website’s design and then getting feedback on their honest opinions or monitoring how the site performs as they use it. Try this technique to make sure that your users can navigate freely and with ease.
Conclusion
It is becoming more challenging to find businesses in any industry sector who aren’t online. By that same token, it is becoming hard to survive as a business without a website. Once you are online, you can’t consider that job done because website optimization is the remaining part of the battle, with a whole load of pitfalls. With this list, you can maintain a high-speed website for all of your users.
About the Author
Martha Jameson is a content editor and proofreader at PhDKingdom and NextCoursework. Before she chose writing as her calling, she was a web designer and a manager. Martha’s primary goal is to share her experience, motivation, and knowledge with her readers.