In this digital era, you cannot ignore the fact that many people are visiting your website on their tablets and smartphones. If your website is not responsive or mobile friendly by now, chances are you are losing a large number of visitors. Therefore, it is always a good idea to embrace responsive design. Since I have the experience of designing many responsive websites, I would like to share ten useful tips to design excellent responsive websites.

10 Responsive Web Design Tips

1.Start With a Mobile First Approach

You should build the mobile site first, and then scale up and build the tablet and desktop designs of the website. One of the major concerns for all three (mobile, tablet and desktop) is the logo and/or text. If the text is easy to read on the mobile device, then you should not have any issues with the desktop or tablet.

2.Make Proper Planning of Content

Content planning is always the top priority for designing responsive website. Building a responsive web design is the perfect time to make the website content more readable and accessible, regardless of what device it is being viewed on. You should map out the order that the content of website should appear on each page at the smallest browser width.

3.Build the Layout of Your Site First

I recommend you to build the entire layout of the interface before doing the coding. In this way, you will have the website-look that your client wants. While building a mobile site layout, one important consideration is to make the buttons large enough for a fingertip.

Another consideration is to keep the website design simple and functional. I’ve seen many designers to add too much to a mobile interface, but it is not required as it can cause many designs and usability problems.

4.Say ‘NO’ to Navigation Menus

As responsive websites target smaller screens (smartphones or tablets), it is always recommended to hide the main navigation menu. In its place, you can choose combining an icon and text for indicating the user about the menu. You can either include a simple drop-down menu which slides down or an overlay technique where the menu expands and covers the entire screen. If your website contains only 2-3 navigational menus, you can include these in a simple menu on the screen. If there are more than 3 elements, you can consider creating a single icon that opens into a drop down menu.

5.Try to Use Many Software Programs

For building a complex web design, you should use custom programs and code for each site individually. Using a template with WordPress will not be enough for building complex web design. For example, if your layout is fairly straightforward you can use a template such as ‘Moboom’, but for a complex layout you should use programs such as a standalone program such as GoMobi for the mobile layout and Adobe Dreamweaver for the desktop.

6.Breakpoints

A common designing idea is that breakpoints should be based on common screen sizes (tablet, mobile, and desktop). However, by developing for specific device resolutions, we are not fully accepting the potential of responsive design, which is centered on flexibility, fluidity, and adaptability. It is a good idea to take a device agnostic approach and set breakpoints according to the content of site. You should explore your design so as to find the points where it naturally breaks down.

7.Create Optimized Images

For building responsive design layouts, you should create optimized images for each layout. In this way, you can reduce bandwidth and scaling issues. Try to use GIF, JPEG, and PNG-8 file formats. You should never use PNG, as it can bloat your files sizes by 5 to 10 times.

You should try to use exact measurements with images (i.e. 500x350px at 100ppi) and set image dimensions to match. It will eliminate scaling and will also preserve the quality and resolution of website images. If your images scale this could cause resolution and color depth and problems.

8.The Need for Speed

Slow loading time is one of the drawbacks of responsive web design. A recent study shows that the 48% of responsive websites load anywhere from 4-8 seconds. This length of loading time was acceptable in 1997, but in 2015, 64% of smartphone users expect a website to load in under 4 seconds.

One of the main reasons behind a slow website is non-optimized images. You should quickly scale down hefty images with efficient tools like TinyPNG and Adaptive Images. In addition to this, you should get rid of excessive elements, not only for to enhance user experience, but also for site’s speed. Too many elements weigh down website and make your website unpleasant to look at. For this matter, you can use program for compression like GZIP.

9.Make it Readable

Do not make the readers pinch-to-zoom or squint to read, therefore, make the text size large enough to read from a smaller screen. A text size of 16 px, 1 em, or 12 pt is recommended. For designing headlines, you can use a tool like FitText to create responsive text.

10.Design for Screen Orientation

According to statistics, landscape orientation is used by 59% people whereas portrait orientation is used by 41% people. You should design your website to look good on both of these orientations, but pay more attention to landscape orientation. You should make sure that your images are not stretched in this orientation.

Wrapping Up

Responsive design of website makes it easier for all the users to view your site no matter what device they use. Creating enticing responsive web designs requires an extensive amount of efforts and time. If you use above ten easy-to-follow techniques for creating responsive web designs, I am sure you can easily make a perfect responsive website. If you know some other best practices that websites should follow, you can share with us in the comment box.

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Recently the Google Webmaster team on Google+ asked their followers which mobile configuration strategy they use. 81% out of the 774 votes (at the time of this writing) responded with responsive web design. 4% said dynamic serving, 7% said separate mobile URLs, and only 8% said their site is not mobile friendly.

In a research post of Guy Podjarny, web performance researcher and evangelist at Akamai’s Web Experience business unit, some figures are presented. The chart shown below demonstrates the percentage of responsive websites amongst the top 100; 1,000 and 10,000 sites. The figure showed that just 18.7% of a list of 10,000 top-tier websites is responsive. When top 100 sites are analyzed, only 11.8% use responsive web design.

This study suggests the move to responsive websites is happening slowly on the top 100 websites as compared to the top 1,000 or top 10,000 websites, perhaps because big companies are more likely to have multiple stakeholders and more complex websites.

Although adoption in practice is not nearly as high as the unscientific survey of Google would suggest, responsive websites are growing quite quickly to the point where they are now catching up with the separate URLs as the dominant mobile website configuration method.

One question might be popping in your mind is why responsive websites are gaining popularity. There are various reasons that explain why incorporating the responsive website design is necessary. Some of these reasons are listed below:

• Better search engine optimization- the search engine giant, Google has clearly indicated that it prefers responsive web designs to the mobile templates. Further, using single URL with the responsive design makes it easy for the search engines to crawl and index the website.
• Reduced bounce rate due to better user experience- A responsive web design offers users various features when accessed on the mobile device that results in reduced bounce rate.
• A single SEO campaign for companies’ website- If any businesses don’t opt for the responsive web designs, they have two websites to manage. However, with the responsive website, the business needs to focus solely on the main site functioning.
• Easier long term maintenance- A responsive site much easier to maintain than the mobile versions of the main sites because the smart devices are updated at instant speed.

The Responsive Web Design adoption is growing rapidly. If you want to take your company to the way of success, you should also keep encouraging the use of RWD, but at the same time you have to double your efforts in building knowledge and tooling for making responsive websites fast.

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Responsive web design is the practice of creating websites that display evenly on all devices as the design adjusts itself automatically as per the screen size of the user i.e. whether desktop or mobile. While the Internet has brought globalization across the world, mobile growth has also picked explosive growth in the recent years taking mobile internet usage to remarkably higher levels. The growth of mobile internet usage has surpassed the use of Internet over desktop and laptops, thus forcing the developers to know about the trending term “Responsive Web Design”.

Definition of Responsive Web Design

Although there are numerous definitions of responsive web design available over internet, but I will explain here one of the most general definition of this new term.

“Responsive web design is a design approach that is aimed at developing websites suitable to work on all types of devices, which have different screen sizes such as mobile phones, tablets, and kindle fires. ” 

When did the term came into existence?

A good question to answer, and for getting the accurate answer we have to go back in the dark days of mobile internet when it had not been so much popular and majority of the websites was served via a technology called “Wireless Application Protocol”. Moreover, the browsers on mobile phones and tablets were limited in terms of bandwidth, standard compatibility and CSS. Hence, the need for a technique of adapting a website’s layout to a device’s display arises.

The urge of having this technique was first written by Cameron Adams in 2004 but the term “Responsive Web Design” was coined by Ethane Marcotte in May 2010 in his “A List Apart” article. The complete theory and practices concerning to this new technology of developing websites was explained by Ethane Marcotte in his book named as “Responsive Web Design”.

Key Principles of Responsive Web Design

The vital difference that separates responsive design from other web development approaches is its focus on including breakpoints in the website design instead of targeting different devices.
If you are developing a responsive web design, you must adhere to the key principles of this technique, which are listed as follows:

• Use Fluid Grid Systems
• Targeting Vital Content
• Mobile First Viewpoint

Use of Fluid Grid Systems

Consisting of a series of rows and columns, the fluid grid systems convey order and consistency in a responsive website design. They present an organizational framework to help in creating the order in which the information needs to be presented over the site. This organizational framework makes it easier for the visitors to follow the information conveniently and get what they are searching for.

For example, a website might have 3 columns next to each other in the desktop version, but in mobile versions, these columns will become narrower and hence, it is better to present these columns in stacked format over a mobile screen requiring the user to scroll the web page to see the content.

An example of a responsive website with the fluid grid system is given as follows:

On desktop and tablet view, the “Quick Links” and “Global Projects” is placed next to each other while on the mobile screen, the latest news takes the entire width of the screen while the Global Projects and Quick Links are located below, which can be accessed by scrolling down the web page.

Targeting Vital Content

Prioritizing the most relevant information and fields such as vital content for both visitors and site owners is important for devising strategic responsive design. You need to take care of the content while designing your website through the responsive technique as it plays a major role in making your website searchable over the popular search engines.

The perfect example of a responsive website design, which sticks to its priorities is the US President Barack Obama’s website:

When the width of the site narrows, the “DONATE” button comes at front-and-center along with “Log in” and “Create Account” buttons while the “Email” and ZIP“ buttons forms the left over points. Impressively placed, the “THE VERY LATEST” option tops up a list of easy-to-tap links. The pictures are prominent over the site with central calls to actions remain unaffected.

Mobile First Viewport

Do you know that most of the websites get 25% traffic through mobile while 75 % traffic through desktops? But then also, responsive web design is becoming increasingly popular, why? Your approach should be focused on desktop visitors first.

While this logic is used in website design but logically, if we design the website as per desktop configuration, we might end up putting a lot of features and functionalities in our website, which are otherwise unnecessary for the mobile users since they wouldn’t be able to access those features on their smartphone browsers. With mobile first viewpoint, we begin loading the complete bare necessities on smaller platforms, which leads to a better website viewing experience that avoids needless lag.

Understanding the Basics of Responsive Web Design

Considered as a set of modern techniques and tools, responsive web design aims to rearrange the way information is displayed according to the device capabilities. The key to this technique is response, which means procuring information about the devices, react and show an adapted version of the website.

The basics of a responsive web design include the following points:

• Use of Media Queries
• Use of Simple Layouts
• Use of Flexible Grids

Use of Media Queries

Media queries are simple filters, which are executed in the CSS styles. They help in changing the styles easily depending on the characteristics of the device rendering the content, consisting of the display width, height, type, resolution and orientation.

You can place all the styles which are required for printing within a print media query like this:
< link rel=”stylesheet” href=”print.css” media=”print”>
Moreover, you can apply the media queries in two other ways that can be easily embedded in a CSS file:
@import and @media.
For performance, any of the two methods are preferred over the @import syntax as this:
@media print {
/* print style sheets go here */
}
@import url(print.css) print;

You can also implement media queries depending on the viewport sizes.
The syntax of media queries, which can be executed depending on the device configurations is:
@media (query) {
/* CSS Rules used when query matches */
}

Use of Simple Layouts

It might sound boring, but keeping your site’s layout simple is the first thing to execute while developing a responsive website. Try to keep your HTML coding simple and clean and don’t apply too much tricky code like CSS3 special effects or JavaScript for designing the critical parts of the website’s layout.

Use of Flexible Grids

Use flexible grids while building a responsive website because flexible grids uses columns for organizing the content and offers relative instead of fixed width for adapting the viewport size. Fluid layout is the best way to get adept to different screen sizes and orientations.

The website of Dusty Cartridge is the perfect example of fluid grid systems:

Adding Viewport Meta Tag to the Responsive Website

The viewport meta tag changes the behavior of a mobile browser by altering the “virtual viewpoint” of any device. The virtual viewpoint is the view of a mobile screen, which is different from the default view. Hence, it is called as virtual viewpoint. It allows the screens to have definite zoom behaviors.

The code snippet used in a responsive template is given as follows:

This code snippet tells the mobile phones not to zoom and also allows the responsive template of mobile devices to be loaded in the scripts.

Here is the table explaining the Meta Tag Viewpoint properties:

Vital Patterns and Modules of Responsive Web Design

There are numerous patterns used in Responsive web designing. However, the most important patterns used in this technique include:

• Mostly Fluid
• Column Drop
• Layout Shifter
• Tiny Tweaks
• Off Canvas

Mostly Fluid

This is the most popular pattern used in responsive web design and is perhaps most simple as well. This pattern consists of a multi-column layout, which introduces bigger margins on huge screens and relies on fluid grids and pictures to scale from huge screens down to small screens.

The biggest benefit of using this pattern is it usually needs one breakpoint between the large and small screens.

Column Drop

It is another popular pattern of responsive web design, which comes with a multi-column layout and closes with a single column layout, dropping the columns along the way as the screen sizes become smaller.

However, unlike the Mostly Fluid pattern, the general size of elements in this pattern stays consistent.

Layout Shifter

This responsive web design pattern does the most when it comes to adapting according to varying screen sizes, which means different layouts are used on different screen sizes.

Although it requires a little more effort than the Mostly Fluid and Column Drop patterns, yet it is implemented on most of the responsively designed web sites.

Tiny Tweaks

This pattern has the simplest form of adaptation and are used by those businesses, which prefer the simplicity of web pages within a single column layout. It works well with single column layouts like text heavy articles and one page linear website.

For those who are bequeathed with the such simplicity, multi-device adaptation can just be few tiny tweaks to image layout and font sizes.

Off Canvas

Instead of stacking the content vertically, the off canvas pattern puts less frequently used content, including the app menus and navigation off screen and displays them only when the screen size is big enough. In this pattern, the content is just a click away on small screens.

Best Examples of Responsive Website Design

Here I am going to list some websites, which have successfully implemented the responsive design on their websites.

1. Design Week Portland

Incorporated from beginning to end by Portland design, Design Week Portland truly represents the meaning of “fully realized” since, the complete layout is young, authentic and supports the conference’s ability as an authority of a remarkable design.

2. The Next Web

We cannot forget to talk about the responsive design without conceding the platform, which presents the work. The Next Web uses a notable responsive design layout  that looks good on all screen sizes.

3. A Book Apart

A List Apart is an exclusive example of responsive website that takes full advantage of this amazing technique. The layout of this website manages to maintain an orderly display system for products.

4. Tattly

Tattooing company Tattle uses the flexible layout to create a strong impression among its clientele without being cliché.

5. Harvard University

The website of Harvard University embraced the responsive design without loosing its decades of reputation by using the longstanding aesthetic of the University. It is the best example of the difference between design and layout.

6. Time

With an aim to give all the readers the same viewing experience, the famous news portal Time intelligently incorporates the responsive layout in its design to make its website readable and minimal to the readers.

7. Boston Globe

This news corporation paid subscription service has understood the importance of responsive web design. The layout of this website comfortably adjusts itself to varying screen sizes, offering an exceptional reading experience to the readers.

8. Notre Dame
The college’s in-house development team has impressively executed the use of responsive design layout in its website, which highlights strong graphics and elements with minimized navigation bar.

Google’s Supported Configurations of Smartphone’s Optimized Websites

Typically, Google supports three configuration types for smartphone’s optimized websites:

• Websites that use responsive web design on the same URL with each URL serving the same HTML for all devices along with the use of just CSS for modifying the rendering style of web pages.
• Websites that use responsive web design on the same URL with each URL serving different HTML for all devices relying on the type of device used by the internet user.
• Websites that have separate URLs for both Smartphones and Desktops.

Responsive Web Design is growing in popularity at a very fast pace and in the imminent days, almost all websites have to use this latest technique on their websites if they really want to succeed in this competitive marketplace. Your online business success will definitely get a major boost if you cover both desktop users and mobile users because in the coming years, the mobile internet usage is surely going to leave behind the desktop internet usage. So, you can hire skilled responsive web designers for getting finest responsive design services at industry best price.

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With exponential germination of newer devices, varied platforms and latest desktop and mobile-specific browsers, it has become indispensable for every business owner to ensure their websites render perfectly irrespective of the device being used by the audience. With mobile browsing gaining hype everywhere, it is imperative to mould the website structure in a way that it delivers all the important information, products and news easily and effectively.

Thus, clients tend to hire responsible website designers who are well versed with the newest tools and techniques that let websites adopt finger-friendly strategy, magnetize visitors and convert them subsequently. While conventional design approach requires one to create a separate web design per device, responsive designs ease the task by detecting screen resolutions smartly and adjusting their layouts accordingly, thereby, catering to the audience with Mobile-First approach. Imagine how soothing it is to see your web design layout adapting to the viewing environment (the browser) and responding to every screen resolution (the device) flawlessly. So, fasten your belts and dive into the following article to join us on a ride that gives Life To Your Designs.

Want One Website For Every Screen?? Adopt The Perfect Solution — RWD

Responsive website designing (RWD) is a technology that refers to crafting of websites in a manner that gives optimal viewing experience, hassle free readability and smooth navigational charm along with minimal resizing and scrolling on multitude of devices. Not just this, a responsive site lets you –

1. Create and Manage a single site instead of Individual Sites for every device and browser
2. Optimize only 1 site for SEO purposes. According to latest recommendations by Google, you must make your website responsive to top the search engine rankings.
3. Do time-optimization and Build your site cost-effectively.

Get Familiar With The RWD Approach

RWD technology uses a mixture of following two approaches.

1. Automatically resizing the page elements including images by defining relative units(%ages) rather than absolute units (fixed pixel widths).
2. Using custom styling rules based on the characteristics of the targeted devices, browsers and specific resolutions.

Know The 3 Basic Ingredients Of RWD-:

1. Fluid Grids – Fluid Grids resize the page elements in relative units (%ages) instead of the absolute ones (pixels) so as to prevent them displaying outside their containing element. In generic words, fluid designs let you customize your grid columns in sync with the screen width limits.
2. Flexible Images – In this concept, fixed pixel widths are not defined for images as a consequence of which, they can move and scale in sync with the flexible grid. One can accomplish this by scaling down oversized images down to match the container width using the following CSS code:
   img { max-width: 100%; }
3. CSS media queries – Media Queries is a tactic that lets you define different styles for different screen sizes based on browser windows, their orientation, screen resolution, and color. Let’s have a look at few lines of code shared below to understand better.@media only screen and (max-device-width: 480px) {
   /* define your device specific styles here */
   }

Learn The Popular RWD Tools –

1. Your First Weapon to Quick Project Development – BOOTSTRAP

Bootstrap is an open source module based front end framework which was introduced by Twitter in August 2011 and soon became the most popular GitHub Development Project in 2012. It’s latest version Bootstrap 3.0 supports responsive design and comes with the following basic modules and re-usable components that are a pre-requisite in every website design.

1. Columns and Tables
2. Forms and Buttons
3. Dropdowns and Breadcrumbs
4. Paginations, Thumbnails and Headers
5. Carousels and Collapsible Menus

Not just this, the toolkit also comes bundled with some JQuery Plugins (Dojo Bootstrap), a few controls to support UI Bootstrap (Angular Js) and an exclusive stylesheet Less.css that lets you organize your style codes, cascade them and speed up your UI development even more.

2. Your Website is in WordPress?? Skeleton is the Solution !!

Skeleton is a framework based on a simple 960px grid system that comes bundled with a collection of stylesheets to help you build responsive websites quickly and rapidly. Not only this, it offers you an exclusive extension for WordPress called Skeleton Plus which is a WordPress theme that helps one to design simply beautiful mobile-friendly websites on the most popular content management system-Wordpress.

Major features of Skeleton-:

1. It is one of the most lightweight and scalable frameworks available till now.
2. It’s layout scales seamlessly from 960px to tablets , mobiles and other handheld devices.
3. Strong topographical features

3. Test Your Website On “Screenfly” Tool Before Going Live

With so many devices and varied browsers in hype, it becomes difficult to test your design fitting pretty well on every screen size. For this, you probably need a testing tool to quickly get an idea as to how your website will deliver on major gadgets and multiple browser windows. Screenfly is a responsive emulator by ”QuirkTools” that helps you waive off all your worries by allowing you to test your design on a plethora of devices absolutely free of cost. Just visit their site http://quirktools.com/screenfly/, enter your web address and choose amongst 27 different devices including 2 Netbooks, 2 Notebooks, 5 different Desktops, 6 Tablets, 9 major Mobile Phones and 3 TV screen resolutions on both portrait and landscape mode. Not just this, there is an option to let you define your own custom screen size right at the top and apply it to check how your website renders on that particular resolution. Amazing, isn’t it??

Major CSS Tricks For RWD

The First Trick – Define your Breakpoints clearly

There are 6 major breakpoints that you should not forget to define if you want to have a responsive layout for your site. Accomplish all this using CSS Media Queries .

The Next Trick – Make your Layouts Flexible using Flexible Grids!!

You must use Flexible containers to make your layouts adapt quickly to every screen size. Flexible Grids use –

1. Columns to Organize your content
2. Relative widths to adapt to the viewport size

To accomplish this, we recommend using Grid based Frameworks that lets you use a separate style sheet to make the task quicker and easier.

Some of the best Grid Systems available for free include-

1. 960 Grid System (960.gs)
2. Golden Grid System(goldengridsystem.com)
3. Columnal(columnal.com)
4. 1140 CSS grid(cssgrid.net)

Just Wrap a specifically styled div with the layout div in case you want to have custom visual styles on your flexible container element that is defining the responsive layout.

The Most Important Trick – Let your visual media react!!

By this we mean, you should make your Graphic Media( images and videos) actually behave and respond to every screen size as well as browser window. As a conventional approach, many of us are still in a habit to set absolute widths and fixed heights for our images which makes them inflexible and thus deliver ugly on most of the devices. As an RWD process, inflexible images have to be converted to flexible to make them actually respond to changing device and browser environment. To simply adjust your width (Adaptive Sizing Technique), use the style attribute- img {width:100%}. Variable Breakpoints clubbed with media queries can also be used for alternate pictures if you don’t have any problem with the Bandwidth usage.

The Final Trick – Use Percentage Based Styling Smartly !!

The switching from pixel based layouts to percentage layouts is indeed the most critical aspect in RWD process. There are so many small and large design elements in a website that it becomes really challenging to bang over the head with nested %age layouts(%age inside %age) unless you are a calculation nerd and still ending up madly frustrated with everything cluttered across the screen. For this, we recommend you to

1. Use %ages only for your Headers, footers, Sidebars and other big elements and
2. Hardcode small design elements , paddings or margins (Values as small as 1-10px) using pixels only

Last , but not the least, we will strongly advise novices to gain sufficient knowledge on Responsive Web Designing Technology to have a pressure-less and hassle-free experience on all your forthcoming projects. Enjoy your site on all devices and drive your audience crazy keeping all the tools and tricks handy!!

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In the cut-throat online world,  responsive web design has become the need of the hour. Let us understand the prominent features of the responsive web design:

Flexible Websites: In recent years, the use of handheld or portable devices has increased rapidly. The devices such as the smartphones, tablets and mini-laptops are frequently used by the users to access the internet adding the high amount of traffic to the websites. Therefore, there is a need to develop flexible websites, which can fit in all types of screens available in the markets. And, the responsive website designs accomplish the requirements efficiently.

Quick Navigation: Such website designs have to shrink or spread according to the screens. The use of CSS and PHP technology has helped in facilitating easy navigation to the users. To streamline the navigation on the websites a variety of menu buttons, links, and collapsing or expanding texts are used to provide high-end experience to the users.

Minimize Loading Time: A responsive website has a clutter free design and browser compatibility features. This facilitates in loading the web pages quickly and easily on various device screens. Moreover, the web designs are rigorously checked at every developing lifecycle to develop  the bug free websites.

Moreover, Google is constantly updating its algorithms to provide a better experience to the internet users. All the updates released during the past two years have completely focused on the quality of the content, good link building and web designs.

It is noticed by the SEO professionals that the algorithms of the search engines have been programmed according to the users’ needs and requirements.

For example, a user prefers:

1. The websites that load quickly on the various devices.
2. The web pages that can spread or shrink according to screen sizes.
3. The web design that never crops the images or content out of the screen.
4. The websites with qualitative and informative content with attractive graphics.

Though the list of preferences does not end here, the algorithm has many strings that strongly signify ‘users’ preferences’. In addition with it, the search engine also considers ‘White Hat techniques’ used in the web design.

Users prefer websites that have genuine information, perfect layout and quickly load on all devices. They are not only spending more time on these sites, but also come back next time. Furthermore, users prefer searching for solutions, products and services in their nearby locations. Thus, it is always important to target regional or geographical keywords with Meta description in responsive design that helps in improving the ranking of the sites.

Here Google plays a major role:

1. It checks for the bounce rate of the website.
2. It also checks for the social sharing.
3. It also records the average time spent on the web pages by the users.
4. It also checks whether the sites are optimized according to the local searches.

These key-indicators determine the quality of the websites that increase or decrease the possibilities to gain better ranking on the top search pages accordingly.

The search engines like fresh, unique and attractive designs. However,very few know the exact definition of the unique and fresh approach.  According to the search engine, an online element (web design, content or link) must have new and user-oriented information and details. ‘Fresh’ – defines the new updates or latest trends prevailing in the market. Therefore, the responsive web design services must have a fresh and unique approach for the users and crawlers.

Thus, the  search engines, especially Google, always consider the responsive website designs, which meet all the above-mentioned requirements and provides better experience to the users.

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Even without statistical proofs, website designers can definitively conclude that mobile devices are the next great frontier of Internet browsing. As such, developing a business website should always take into consideration creating a responsive website design.

That being said, building a responsive website from scratch is not a walk in the park and even the most experienced web designing companies may not readily be able to create a responsive web platform on their own. Luckily, there are pre-existing responsive design frameworks that are readily available for use.

Enumerated below are some of the most widely used responsive design frameworks website designers all over the world are using.

Bootstrap

Bootstrap is arguably the most popular framework in creating a responsive website design. Co-created by former Twitter web platform designer Mark Otto, Bootstrap is fully customizable and packs a number of features or components including navigation, typography, form controls, and a responsive grid with 12 columns JavaScript plugins just to name a few.

Foundation

Whether its claim of being “the most advanced responsive front-end framework in the world” is true or not, Foundation is definitely a hit among responsive website designers. Like bootstrap, Foundation also has a 12-colum adaptable grid that allows designers to create sophisticated layouts without the need to create custom elements from scratch. The team behind Foundation recognizes that the process of developing a business website involves several revisions and modifications which is why this framework allows for expedient prototyping to let website designers change and manipulate design elements conveniently. Further, websites created using Foundation is compatible with all devices, screen resolutions and screen sizes.

320 and Up

Web designing companies created responsive web design to fit websites into small screens. Seemingly contradicting this is the out-of-the-box responsive design boilerplate 320 and Up. It’s a responsive web design framework that takes into consideration “tiny screens first” and bigger screen sizes are the “responsive versions.” 320 and Up’s toolkit is streamlined and contains only usable files and styles. It also has the scripts LESS and Sass, but designers who are more comfortable using CSS may also do so.

Gumby

Whether this responsive web design framework takes inspiration from the clay humanoid character Gumby or not, it definitely is as pliable and adaptable as the character it takes its name after from. Web designing companies recommend this for designers who are not yet that familiar with creating a responsive website design as it is lightweight and pretty straightforward. It only features a User Interface andPSDkit so you can create site mockups using the method you’re used to. Similar to Foundation, Gumby allows for fast prototyping.

Website Designers Don’t Need to Scratch from Square One

Developing a business website with responsive design in mind is no longer an option but a necessity. For designers, using these platforms will definitely make the job easier and even enjoyable.

If you’ve tried out designing a site using the platforms above, please let me know your experience and do share other platforms that you found really useful.

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Responsive web design has evolved from a trend to a necessity in web designing services. With experts predicting mobile traffic overtaking “regular traffic” (web traffic from desktops and laptops) by 2014 and with data showing that 90% of mobile searches result to a response to a site’s call-to-action, having a site that is compatible across mobile devices is a must.

There are two routes that a responsive website design company can take to create websites specifically made for the mobile audience. Choosing which one you should use depends on your resources and the frequency of how your website is updated.

The Adaptive Method

First, there’s the Adaptive approach. This type of responsive website design is executed by creating web layouts based on different width ranges. Typically, this method produces three layouts that are targeted for specific widths such as tablets and mobile devices. However, if a user is browsing via a device with a screen size that falls outside these width ranges, browsing issues may start to surface. This is one of the disadvantages of using this approach. Another disadvantage websites built using this technique is not forward looking. This means that it would work on the most widely used devices today.

On the other hand, an advantage of this approach is a relatively easier testing process since there are only three layouts to be tested. Also, since these layouts are specifically made to the most prevalent widths of the hottest devices at a given time, a responsive website design company can assure a client that his site is optimized for the majority of the mobile internet users.

So, who should use the adaptive method? This approach is highly recommended for websites or organizations that redesign their sites frequently. Businesses whose online marketing strategies involve developing new mobile executions every so often and do not really stay with a specific mobile site version for more than two years will find the adaptive approach advantageous.

The Fluid Method

On the contrary, organizations whose websites don’t really change that much should explore the other responsive website design option which is the Fluid approach. From the term fluid, these responsive web designing services employing this technique has no fix or true form. Just like water or any other liquid, it takes the shape of its container. In this case, Fluid sites automatically adjusts to whatever screen width they are viewed on – from the relatively smaller screens of some smartphones to the bigger screens of tablets.

A fluid responsive web design is created by using percentages for widths, instead of a definite range of pixels. If done by a reputable and experienced responsive web design company, sites that are built using the Fluid approach will always appear balanced and proportional.

However, since this method is more all-encompassing compared to the adaptive method, a lot of resources should be dedicated in terms of ensuring that the width percentages are calculated and coded properly, hence, the testing phase of these sites can be pretty extensive. Another disadvantage of this technique is it assumes that responsive web design technology will always be the preeminent in mobile web design. However, as anyone involved in professional web designing services knows, there is nothing constant in this practice but change.

One or Two? It’s Up to You!

Ultimately, whether you should choose the Adaptive approach of the Fluid approach depends on your business needs and the nature of your web properties. One thing is for sure though: Mobile internet use is on the rise and with the light speed rate of how technology is changing, no one can afford to get left behind.

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Say goodbye to the “one site fits all screen sizes” web development and design paradigm. According to the latest study conducted by the research firm Gartner, global PC sales decline by 1.2% in 2012 despite the much hyped launch of the Windows 8.

On the other end of the spectrum, another research by Gartner revealed that smartphones were up by 42.7% and a separate study by International Data Corporation (IDC) showed that the projected total sales for tablet devices in 2013 will breach the 170-million mark and is even predicted to outdo netbooks’ sales performance.

If you let these numbers speak for themselves, website design companies should hear loud and clear that the next gen SEO and SMO will be heavily anchored on responsive web designs.

SEO and SMO in a Post PC Era

According to tech media giant Mashable, they expect that mobile visitors will comprise more than 50% of their site’s total traffic by the conclusion of 2013. While this projection can vary from one industry to another, the point is mobile traffic is destined to gain momentum and capturing this on-the-go audience is crucial to success.

It was not too long ago that in order for a site to be optimized for the mobile audience, website design companies had to create specific layouts for different screen sizes across varying devices. Today, thanks to advancements in responsive web design tools and technologies, creating a website that automatically responds or adjusts to a specific screen size based on media queries.

Everything starts with proper coding. There are basically two approaches you can take in terms of responsive design. First, is to create layouts based on specifically identified screen size ranges. This is much simpler to do, but will only cover the most popular devices in a given time. The next approach is the fluid approach which takes into consideration percentages instead of the screen sizes. This is trickier and probably more expensive to do, but you are assured that your site is optimized for viewing for present gadgets and those that are yet to be released.

Why Can’t You Ignore Mobile in 2013

Different companies have different reason for not using responsive web design tools in their web development initiatives. Small businesses might say that they don’t need it because of their small operations while enterprises might say reason that they don’t see where mobile fits into their overall marketing strategy.

According to a presentation by Mary Meeker who is dubbed as the “The Queen of the Net,” 24% of all online shopping that place on Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving and one of the peaks in the US shopping season) was done using a smartphone or a tablet. Whatever your business size is, tapping into website design companies to bring your mobile marketing to the next gen SEO and SMO by using responsive web design tools is a sound business decision.

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The best tools for Responsive Web Design are based on the three elements that make a website responsive. 1. Flexible/Fluid grid, 2. Responsive Images and 3. Media Queries. The best tools are ones that help you to achieve the elements necessary to make your site responsive on as many devices and screen sizes possible.

Using Prebuilt Flexible/Fluid Grids

You can quickly download prebuilt flexible/fluid grids to save time and get your responsive site completed easily and effectively. The other benefit of using prebuilt grids, such as the Golden Grid System, is because it easily adapts 16 to 8 or 8 to 4 columns through “folding”. The Golden Grid System also has a small browser overlay that will expose the grid on your page so you can test your design.

The 1140px CSS Grid is another good prebuilt flexible/fluid grid you can use. This tool allows you to design from a wide desktop resolution down to the smallest of devices. It will fit into the 1280 monitor but will also become fluid and adapt to smaller monitors correctly.

Using a Responsive Calculator will help you with your workflow as well. A responsive calculator will calculate pixels to percentages and also will generate CSS rules that can then be easily copy/pasted into your style sheets.

Tools for Responsive Web Design Images and Text

Another key element to Responsive Web Design is having responsive images and text. To achieve fluid images and text you can use The Filament Group’s Responsive Images. Responsive Images will allow you send appropriately sized images based on the screen resolution. Adaptive Images is based on this same premise. However, with Adaptive Images by Matt Wilcox, PHP and some JavaScript are used to serve the appropriate image size but without the extra mark up.

As for responsive text, there are some plugins available to help improve your workflow. The jQuery plugin, FitText, will make font sizes flexible and helps to achieve scalable headlines. The headlines will fill the width of the parent element. To make bold blocks of text resize responsively you can use the SlabType Algorhythm.

Media Queries Tools for Responsive Web Design

Once you can envision the fluid/flexible layout of your site as well as how to make your images and text responsive across all devices, you now need to concern yourself with media queries. Media queries are necessary to shift the pages elements into a responsive state.

CSS3-Mediaqueries.js is a tool that will enable appropriate rendering on older versions of Internet Explorer as well as other browsers. Adapt.js is a tool that will detect the browser dimensions of the user’s device and it works correctly with most older and newer browsers.

The Categorizr is another helpful tool that will assume devices being used are mobile unless the user’s tablet or desktop informs otherwise. Using the Categorizr allows service of the resources to the browser sympathetically.

These are some of the best Responsive Web Design tools available, but are in no way an all-inclusive list. There are many tools available to help you improve your workflow. When you using Responsive Web Design you will find it is essential to have as many appropriate tools necessary so that you can make the best design in the least amount of time. Many web designers will attest that one of the quickest and most effective ways to improve workflow is to use shortcuts available that will not decrease your creativity. Allowing Responsive Web Design generator tools take on some of the busy-work will not affect the overall creativity of the site. It gives the web designer, more time to focus on making your design fresh and unique.

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The technology is progressing ahead at huge pace, and almost every month various new electronic gadgets get launched in the international market, and one of those gadgets is a smartphone.

In-fact smartphone is one of the most ‘in-demand’ products, as it provides the user with a flexibility to use high-speed internet on the go and stay in touch with his family and friends via email and other mobile applications such as WhatsApp, and also let him browse through websites that are useful to him.

However, for web designers it is one of the difficult tasks to cope up with as every other mobile phone, computer and laptop has a different screen size, which makes it difficult for him to design a compatible website. This is where the need for ‘Responsive Web Design’ comes.

A Responsive Web Design is something that plays a crucial role in the success of a website. A few years back, web designers never used to consider mobile phones, tablets, and different screens while designing a website, as only a few numbers of people used to carry them.

However, the situation is totally opposite now, and hardly there are only a few numbers of people who might not have a mobile phone or tablet to access internet, therefore, every website design should be responsive in nature, which eventually means that it should be able to get fit into any screen size be it a 3-inch mobile phone screen or a 19-inch desktop screen.

To make a responsive web design, the web designer must have three-way approach in which he needs to focus on a flexible grid, flexible images, and media queries. So let us begin with the Grid system and Background images.

Grid system and background images

Have you ever seen an online magazine? If not, then view it on your laptop or desktop and then try to view it on your smartphone, most probably you will see that the website’s size doesn’t fit in your mobile phone screen. That is because generally, magazine websites are not made using the grid system.

Therefore, to turn the design into a responsive web design, you need to implement the grid system and to make the layout flexible, the measurements should not be given in pixels, and instead, you should use percentage.

For example; if you keep the value of width as 50%, it will always be half of the screen the website is being viewed on, regardless of the screen size, and that is where flexible and responsive web design begins.

If you have a plan to use an image in the background, then you need to select the appropriate image or else you might end up wasting your time because photographs, vectors or any other images which can’t be tiled are not the appropriate ones to be used with a fluid grid system.

In addition to this, don’t use horizontal gradients either as they don’t scale well horizontally, the texture border also looks terrible. If there is something you can use easily and without any doubt then it is a texture only, which is easy to the tile such as grunge, grain, etc.

Trim down everything

While using the responsive approach to make web designs, you need to trim down everything be it the width or height of the web design.

Therefore, always try to use web elements in such a way that if the user has a small browser width he’ll still be able to view everything available on that page, and this could be easily achieved if you use a flexible wrapper made in percent rather than pixels.

Media Queries for desktop, iPhone and iPad

In general, media queries refer to the layout of the website and decide how it is going to be on the platform you are designing for.

The main problem of web designers it that they do not consider different types of mobile phone screen sizes while designing and only stick to the desktop and iPad screen sizes, and because of these modules the user face problems while accessing the website on mobile phones. Therefore, to make all the modules work according to the different screen sizes, the design has to be flexible, and this could be easily achieved or done by using the media queries in the right manner.

By now you must have understood how crucial your web design is in making the website successful by attracting a lot of web users via responsive web design and providing them with what they actually look for.

So, while designing responsive websites, it is important for you to take ample care so that the website fits on screens of all devices—laptops, desktops, mobiles, and tablets. Here are the following top trends for you to consider:

Using Vector Graphics

Discard Raster Graphics and instead use Vector Graphics. While Vector graphics use points on a vector map to build the design, Raster graphics use pixels on a bitmap to generate the design.

Vector graphics thus can be resized without losing the quality, unlike Raster graphics which lose quality on resizing. Vector graphics are crucial elements of responsive web design as they maintain clarity in mobiles, laptops and desktop screens.

Hidden Menus

As the style of homepages with minimal items is gaining popularity, hidden menus are becoming a new trend. It can be used in homepages for all kinds of gadgets, including mobiles, hidden menus involve a menu icon, which when clicked the navigation options appear.

One Paged Website

Websites with a single and long-scrolling page are the best suited for responsive design as these websites fit perfectly on screens of laptops, desktops, and mobiles. Typical single page websites have a navigation bar at the top, and when the links are clicked, the user is directed to the corresponding location on that page itself (instead of a new page).

Card-Based Design

The card-based design is an important part of the responsive web design technology because of the flexibility of rearranging the website by the screen size of the gadget. In such designs, pieces of information are organized in a grid pattern, involving ‘cards’, with images or texts, in visually appealing fashions.

Minimalism

Minimalism is the hottest responsive web designing technique prevailing today. The technique involves the reduction of clutter and simplification of the entire web page the best you can. The underlying idea is to offer the website to visitors in a simple and visually appealing way to draw interest and attention from visitors.

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