Skip to main content

What makes a good responsive design?

By May 5, 2014Web Design

Nowadays, internet is accessible from a number of devices besides Pcs and Mac computers, such as cell phone, tablets. Responsive web design is meant to serve optimum viewing on all the devices. This is aimed at solving problems such as navigation, panning scrolling, making your reading experience easy.

Any website designed with a responsive wed design is able to adapt the layout of your device, this is done by the use of fluid proportion – based grids and flexible images.

Keeping in mind the growing rate of the use in mobile internet, it is important that your website should work on the all devices and with the same quality as it does on the computer monitors.
The first principle of responsive design is keeping in mind that it should work equally across all the devices. This means when someone accesses the website on a cell phone or a tablet it should work without any quality loss. Flexibility in your images, content and grids is required to be flexible and fluid so that it configures accordingly on wide screens and on smaller screens. While you wire frame your site for final coding it is important to understand that some layouts are ideal for design and some are not.

Try to keep the layout simple and not using too many fancy elements, JavaScript and flash elements this could complicate the sightadjustments.Also pay attention to the resolution that can be defined in a range of break points. Some resolutions which are majorly used are 480px for smaller smart phones, 768px this is for larger screen phones, 320px is for the low res phones and 1024px is for the wide screen desktop. Make your images, adaptive to resizing.

A tool which is used to do this is Adaptive Images and this helps in loading the images faster. You can use programs such as GZIP, which helps in compressing the data, so those with low bandwidth. Removing unnecessary white spaces and line breaks can save you some loading time. Design the site in such a way that it does not have unnecessary elements that will not be supported on the cell phones if you have such elements on the main web site get rid of it.

The above are some ofthe basicguidelines that make a good responsivedesign. In the end it totally depends on how you choreograph your website and it can load faster and function well on devices that will have low resolution small processes and low bandwidth.