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How To Keep Your Responsive Web Designs As Engaging As Possible

According to the experts, all businesses should be turning to responsive web design sooner rather than later. One thing that many people struggle with is maintaining their creativity across the website – they know how to make the site engaging for desktop audiences and they know how to make it engaging for mobile audiences, but they don’t know how to make it engaging for both at the same time.

1. Use great typography

Good typography is a staple of any effective web design, but it’s basically a necessity for responsive websites. As the screen size decreases, most of the elements will need to transform and shrink or move, too. Your typography should have this capability. You should also be using different headings and various sizes for your text. Many websites arrange the text in columns that scale down as the screen size decreases.

2. Use great images

Good imagery is actually very similar to good typography in that it is very important to any website. Like typography, the pictures should appear smaller or scaled down when the site is viewed on smaller screens. You should make sure that your large, photographic images have no graphical content on them, as this could be cropped out when the screen size changes – be aware of what will be removed.

3. Use great navigation

If users have no idea how to find their way around your website, you can rest assured that they won’t even try. Navigation is hard when it comes to responsive design, as we have to create process that work in landscape and can be condensed to fit portrait. This isn’t a big problem if you only have a handful of links – you can either make the menu smaller or you can create a drop down menu that groups links.

4. Make it fun to use

Think about this – when you click links on a desktop, you probably have to sit there and wait for the next page to load, which can prove to be even more problematic on a smartphone (especially if you’ve clicked the wrong link). Think about how users browse on screens of all different sizes, then look at your own website and see where improvements can be made. This will make the whole site more intuitive and usable.

5. Think outside the box

It is important to remember that responsive web design is not supposed to be a constraint on the way that we create websites – there is always room to use creativity, whether this is in the design or the code. Some websites don’t look as if they could possibly be responsive – until you view them on a smaller screen and realise that they had plenty of tricks up their sleeves all along.

The good news is that keeping your responsive web design engaging is as simple as sketching out your original concept and revising it until it keeps your goals and is easy to use. You will actually find that the ‘fun stuff’ happens more easily if you begin with how you want the website to work and function. By keeping each of the above tips in mind, you can ensure that your responsive designs are as engaging as possible.

 

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