Many times, responsive design has been misunderstood to mean simply making your website mobile friendly. However, responsive web design is a powerful way to design and code your website in such a way that they can easily browse, shop, as well as buy from the device of their choice.
Likewise, many boardroom meetings center around the topic that many businesses are going responsive to, so we should also follow. However, when looking at actual research and statistics, only 4% of the websites that were viewed on a PC and 8% of emails used responsive web design. Considering that there is a host of screen sizes available today across laptops, desktops, smartphones, tablets, netbooks, and multiple other devices ranging across several operating systems, shouldn’t the response to responsive design be better?
The fact is that despite the current low rate of implementation of responsive design, there is no reason why you should not implement it for your website. In reality, with responsive design, comes greater responsibility of determining which elements are necessary for your mobile website and which are not.
Many retailers get caught between deciding between mobile browsers and mobile responsive design. The deterrence is due to the fact that leaping to responsive design requires a big jump. This also requires much testing and ‘proof-of-concept’. Further, you also need to check how various browsers, mobile operating systems, and other device types render the responsive design in various ways. Just consider a small example. The way an email is rendered via a Gmail app in an android smartphone will be different from the way a Gmail app displays an email using a Mac OS.
All of this content requires you to swipe your finger multiple times to see everything on a mobile device. You need to determine which of these elements require the user’s attention or can be removed altogether.
While working with a traditional PC, users have the luxury of clicking on many navigational elements. There is enough room for most types of links ranging from standard links such as product categories, to seasonal links or even specific offers. In the case of the mobile phone, the screen is much smaller than that of a traditional PC screen, hence there is no room for so many links. While using responsive design, you need to populate your mobile screen with only the more popular links and drop those which are unessential.
You can also use responsive design to scale images to fit the mobile device. Though this may not be the right option especially when it comes to images such as hero images, which may lose their finer details when scaled. In case of animated GIFs, the work well only on some mobile OS and email client combinations. In the case of some mobile connections the large file size may result in delayed views. Hence, it is advisable to use responsive design to replace these images with static images that are smaller in size.
Dealing with calls-to-action on mobile phones is a bit tricky, because tapping the screen with fingers often leads to tapping the wrong links. Hence, for mobile users, you may consider fewer click areas. Alternatively, with responsive design as an option, you can offer mobile subscribers larger, as well as easy-to-tap, click areas.
With responsive design, you get a brilliant insight into how subscribers utilize their devices to view various apps and how they utilize them. Having said that you can also improve your website’s prospects with responsive design. You get a wonderful opportunity to understand how to optimize content for such customers and which elements create the most impact for multi-device subscribers.
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Shivi Rao is a content marketer with Krish. She has worked in various industries spanning technology, science, rural marketing, startups & unicorns, eCommerce business, and digital marketing, believing that content is the foundation to facilitate the visibility of any organization and ensuring her words do the same. In her free time, you can either find her lifting weights in the gym or feeding the strays.
21 December, 2022 After WooCommerce, Shopify is the 2nd most loved and used eCommerce platform worldwide. Shopify is an entirely feature-rich eCommerce platform. It offers many drag-and-drop options, and its apps work tremendously for store owners. In addition, Shopify is easy to use as it doesn't require depth coding.
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