One of the biggest challenges with mobile development has been building a website that is comfortable and accessible for smartphones. This mobile app blog discusses what’s necessary to build a responsive site that doesn’t require an internet connection and loads quickly so people can access it on their phones anywhere, anytime.
If you have ever tried to read an article on your phone then you know what a poor experience it can be. Browsers struggle with touch screen interfaces, text scrolls up the screen and out of view, social media icons take over your entire home screen – these are all issues that are solved by responsive web design.
With responsive mobile web design (or site for short) websites are designed to change based on the skills and screen size of a given device. This allows for a more seamless user experience that avoids frustrating users. While the technical details of how to achieve this are beyond the scope of this article, there are some simple changes you can make to your website to encourage users to interact with it.
When designing a mobile site or application developers often use breakpoints which set specific dimensions as fixed points in thinking about the layout of their content on a smaller screen. When designing sites with multiple screens, some designers will even create “page” breakpoints that define an area where different layouts can be tested.
In addition to the obvious benefits (such as easier navigation for users who are on the move) responsive web design factors in a whole range of other benefits. Most importantly this allows you to have your site working and available offline without compromising on functionality. If you have a site with an enormous amount of content, you could add a mobile version that is as easy to use as reading an email.
When developing sites, responsive design is not always possible. In this article , we show how you can use the most up-to-date tools in order to get the best results from your traditional web development process. There are a variety of elements to consider when designing a mobile site and some will work better than others on specific devices. While responsive design is by far the best functional solution, you can use a variety of tricks to make your site more mobile friendly.
When designing for touch screens, avoid any UI element that takes up more than 10% of the screen since it will be difficult to target accurately with your fingers. Make sure to keep all buttons on one screen and that you only have an icon on your first page – do not link to multiple pages from the home screen; this can confuse users and will not work well on many devices. When designing headers or icons, make sure that they are large enough and that they each stand for something – if the colors aren’t distinct enough then users will interact with them randomly.
