Ever since people have embraced portability and the mobile internet, it has been multiple web designers’ and web developers’ goal to simplify the problem of making a mobile-responsive site that loads quickly, easily and provides a great user experience (UX).
When you create a website, you don’t create it purely for yourself; you develop it primarily for your customers. Using a Responsive Web Design (RWD) is the best way to create a website that is able to be viewed on both a mobile and desktop device. However, you also need to optimise the design to improve the UX for your customers.
RWD – an optimal user experience?
While RWD can provide an optimal viewing experience for users by the use of minimum panning, scrolling, and panning of the site, the challenge still is, and will always be, whether your website performance is good enough to encourage users to continue to navigate around your website.
How to create a quick and responsive site?
There are several techniques you can use in order to improve the usability of a responsive design. For one, you can use one URL to deliver mobile-optimized content to mobile users, and another URL to deliver the same content to desktop users. That way, mobile users will not be loading resources as big as those they normally would when viewing the same website on a desktop device.
While there is no current solution that could quickly solve responsiveness and performance issues, there are tricks that you can use to enhance the usability of your website.:
- When you start developing your website, be sure to follow a mobile-first approach.
- In order to fully judge the performance of the site on mobile, test it on a real device before finally pushing it. Do not completely rely on resizing the desktop browser in order to determine what the user interface of your website will look like on a smaller screen.
- Make use of optimisation tools in order to improve your site’s performance.
- Deliver your images using JavaScript while you wait for a better solution, usually offered by a few browsing vendors.
- Make sure that the JavaScript that you need for the device executes asynchronously or conditionally. If you do not ensure that this is the case, the website will freeze or hang while it waits for the JavaScript to execute.
- If you don’t want to make countless custom-made solutions, you can apply responsiveness according to a group. Ideally, you need to group screen sizes into categories, make designs for each of them and make them as flexible as you can.
If you are not happy with the outcomes of a responsive design, you can always opt for an adaptive design. An adaptive design makes use of static layouts that are based on breakpoints. It works by detecting the screen size and loading the pre-determined layout for relevant screen size. It requires more work, but that’s a small price to pay when you want to achieve your goals.
Fully optimising a site for mobile use is complicated. That’s why it’s better to work with professional designers, like a Sydney web design agency, especially if your stated end goal is to have a high functioning and mobile-responsive site with a great user interface and experience.
