Responsive Website Design – Best Practices

If you want to be successful with your online business, you should choose responsive website design for your business. As a business owner, you should realize how important it is to make your websites compatible with the mobile browsers and with the other hand-held devices. When you do realize the importance of having a responsive website designed for your business, you need to pay attention to certain best practices to enjoy all the benefits of having a responsive website.

When you hire a web design company for responsive website design needs, you should check whether your service provider follows the industry’s best practices while designing responsive websites.

One of the reasons why we are going for responsive websites is due to the fact that internet users access the web using the following types of devices:

1. Regular desktops and laptops without touch sensitive displays.
2. Touch sensitive devices like tablets, laptops and desktops.
3. Touch sensitive devices like iPhones, PDAs, etc., that have very small display.

In other words, there is great diversity in the nature of the devices used and most of the devices today have touch sensitive displays. Your focus here should therefore be on creating optimum browsing experience for your users that use touch sensitive devices regardless of the size of the display.

With touch sensitive devices, people are not going to be using pointing devices like mouse or touch pads for clicking actions. Here, the links or the buttons should therefore be big enough so that it is easy for the users to make their selections using their fingers without touching the adjacent buttons or links. Designing responsive websites is more about designing websites that are user friendly.

Yet another factor that you need to remember here is that when people use mobile devices they are not going to have the comfort or the luxury of a large keyboard to input the required information. If you design websites, which require the user to do a lot of typing then it will affect the overall user experience because it is not easy to type using the virtual keyboards on the touch sensitive devices. The best practice here is to reduce the amount of typing input required while using your website. All the possible options should be provided in the form of a dropdown menu from which the users can select by simple clicking actions and this will certainly enhance the user experience.

Best practices in responsive website design are nothing but thinking through practical usability factors and providing what is best for the users in terms of making things easy and convenient while using your website.