Flexible Web Design
The Power of Responsiveness for Seamless User Experiences
Brands are embracing the digital experience and its tremendous impact. Websites are now one of the most sought after foundations to build a brand’s digital foundation. Hence, websites need to be built with long-term success in mind to influence higher conversions and business growth.
With flexibility as a core focus, brand’s have to regularly consider the following when updating their websites;
Optimize user interface
Optimize speed and performance
Maintain security and
Update new functionalities.
Our Focus today would be on ticking the first item; Optimizing user interface.
As we evolve, so does technology. Having your website look it’s best across any device, be it smartphones, tablets, laptops or larger screens would check a flexibility box. We would talk about everything you need to know about responsive websites.
Responsive Design is an approach to make your web content adapt to different devices and screen sizes. Taking into account every little piece of content on your website and making them look really nice on any screen size. You may wonder, why is this so important; well let’s think about it this way. Your sole desire when designing a website is to reach as many people as possible so how would you be able to track the kind of device used to check out your website? Yeah, I thought so too.
The world is evolving and so is technology, you must and should take into consideration every possible way to make your website look and feel better. When over half of your potential visitors are using a mobile device to browse the internet, you can’t just serve them a page designed for desktop. If your website isn’t optimised for mobile and easy to use, you won’t be able to maximise the ROI of your marketing efforts. Bad conversions will lead to fewer leads and wasted ad spend.
You may have heard of Adaptive web design and wonder what’s the difference between Adaptive and Responsive web design. Whilst they are both responsive approaches, Adaptive Web design delivers multiple completely different versions of the same page, in contrast, responsive design adapts the rendering of a single page version. With responsive design, users access the same basic file through their browser, regardless of device, but CSS code will control the layout and render it differently based on screen size. With adaptive design, there is a script that checks for the screen size, and then accesses the template designed for that device.
Foundations of Responsive Web Designs
HTML and CSS - The foundation of responsive web design rests on the combination of the foundation of website development (HTML and CSS). These languages determine the content and layout of any page. HTML mainly controls the structure, elements, and content of a webpage. CSS is used to edit the design and layout of the elements you include on a page with HTML.
Media Query - This lets you render content to adapt to different factors (screen sizes). The main idea behind media queries is that it checks for the screen’s size before executing the code with the query. Using CSS with media query is how you make a web design responsive. This is an example:
@media screen and (min-width: 780px) {
.full-width-img {
margin: auto;
width: 90%;
}
Using the Fluid Layout - This is the approach of using a dynamic value (percentage) for HTML elements. This approach will dynamically increase or decrease the different container element sizes based on the size of the screen. Hence no matter the screen size, the element adjusts according to the percentage set.
Flexbox - Flexbox is a CSS module designed as a more efficient way to lay out multiple elements, even when the size of the contents inside the container is unknown. A flex container expands items to fill available free space or shrinks them to prevent overflow. These flex containers have a number of unique properties, like justify-content, that you can’t edit with a regular HTML element.
Common Breakpoint for Responsiveness
To work with media queries, you need to decide on the “responsive breakpoints” or screen size breakpoints. A breakpoint is the width of the screen where you use a media query to implement new CSS styles.
Common screen sizes
Mobile: 360 x 640
Mobile: 375 x 667
Mobile: 360 x 720
iPhone X: 375 x 812
Pixel 2: 411 x 731
Tablet: 768 x 1024
Laptop: 1366 x 768
High-res laptop or desktop: 1920 x 1080
Now that you know the building blocks to make a website responsive, you can implement it by:
Set your media query ranges based on the unique needs of your design.
Size elements with percentages or create a CSS grid layout.
Adjust font-sizes to match the screen size.
Test to see that your responsiveness works as you want it to be implemented. You can do this by using the chrome developer tool to test different screen sizes.
Press CTRL + Shift + I on Windows computer, or Command + Option + I on Macs to open/ adjust the relevant device view. From here, you can select the mobile device or screen size of your choice to test the responsiveness of your design.
Do well to make sure you answer these questions while making your website responsive;
1. Does the content fit well inside the layout elements and containers on different screens?
2. Do the font sizes fit each screen?
PX – a single pixel
EM – relative unit based on the font-size of the element.
REM – relative unit based on the font-size of the element.
VH, VW – % of the viewport’s height or width.
% – the percentage of the parent element.
A new web designer or developer should probably stick with pixels for text because they are the most straight-forward unit of length in CSS.
But when setting the width and max-width of images and other elements, using % is the best solution. This approach will make sure the components adjust to the screen size of every device.
Conclusion
Your approach to responsiveness must not block or delay your page’s first render any more than it needs to.
There are several ways you could make your pages faster. Optimising your images by using percentages to determine sizes, implementing caching, using a more efficient CSS layout, avoiding render-blocking JS, or improving your rendering path are all great ideas you should consider.