How to Make a Website Responsive
A responsive website is the most important thing for a business today because it focuses on a broad market. By saying a ‘responsive web design’ i mean creating websites that are compatible with any display size such as mobile phones, tablets, and desktops. If you don’t have a responsive design, you are risking losing a large portion of visitors. Most visitors to your site today are from mobile devices. Even Google prefers ‘mobile first’ today.
According to 53.8 percent of web designers, “not being responsive on all devices” is a primary reason for a website’s makeover. Naturally, website developers and designers place a high priority on developing flexible websites. Today, in this article, we will find out how to assess websites for proper responsiveness.
In the last decade, we have created several websites and Web applications which have made us one of the best web development agencies around the globe. And from our experience, we have discovered several effective ways to make your websites fully responsive to fit on any display.What is a fully responsive website?
Responsive web design is a technique for ensuring that a web page looks good and provides a good user experience on both desktops as well as mobile devices. Let’s find out how we can make a website fully responsive.
How to make a website responsive
As the best web development agency, we have created a strategy to make a website responsive. It has various steps and things to consider. So, let’s get started with the list.
1. Set Appropriate Responsive Breakpoints
In responsive web development, a breakpoint seems to be the “point” from which a website’s content and appearance shift in a particular manner and provide the highest level of satisfaction. Each website is accessed on a broad variety of devices with various screen sizes and specifications. On all screen sizes, the software must render flawlessly. Content or images cannot be changed, edited out, or obscured.
To do this, developers must use responsive breakpoints, also known as CSS breakpoints or media query breakpoints. These are the defined points in the code. In order to display the optimal layout, website content responds to these parameters and adjusts itself to the screen size. With CSS breakpoints in place, website content will adjust to screen size and show in a way that is pleasing to the eye and easy to consume visually.
2. Start with a Fluid Grid
Earlier websites were measured in pixels, but now they are created using a fluid grid. A fluid grid, in essence, arranges and adjusts web items on a site in proportion to the screen size on which they are displayed. Rather than designing objects in a single, fixed size defined in pixels, items on a fluid grid would adapt and resize to match the screen.
A fluid grid is organized into columns, with heights and widths that are scaled rather than fixed. The dimensions of text and elements are determined by the size of the screen. As a custom web development agency, we prefer working on the source code of a website that allows us to create the rules of a fluid grid.
3. Consider touchscreens devices
Consider touchscreens while creating a responsive website. Touchscreens are now standard on most devices (phones and tablets). Some laptops are also catching up, featuring touchscreens in addition to keyboards. Naturally, a responsive website will need to adjust itself to work with touchscreens. As an example, suppose the homepage has a drop-down menu. Each menu item on the desktop must be large enough to be pressed with the fingertip of a touchscreen. Smaller items, such as buttons, should be easier to notice and select on mobile screens.
4. The Layout
The layout is the first thing to consider while creating a responsive design or making an existing one responsive. If you can make a layout good then you can easily edit them. At eComSreet when we create responsive websites, we always begin with a non-responsive layout that is fixed to the default size. CatsWhoCode, for example, has a default width of 1100px.
When we are happy with the non-responsive layout, we use media queries and make minor CSS tweaks to make the site responsive. It’s much easier to concentrate on one task at a time when it comes to web design. When you’re through with your non-responsive layout, the first thing you should do is insert the following lines into your HTML page’s head> and /head> tags.
<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width,initial-scale=1,maximum-scale=1,user-scalable=no”>
<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=edge,chrome=1″>
<meta name=”HandheldFriendly” content=”true”>
This would change the aspect ratio of all screens to 1×1 and disable the default functionality on iPhones and other mobile devices, which renders websites in full-screen mode and allows users to pinch to zoom into the layout.
It’s now time to include some media queries in your code. Media queries, according to the W3C, are made up of a media type and zero or more expressions that check for the conditions of specific media features. Presentations can be adjusted to a specified range of output devices using media queries without modifying the content. To put it another way, media queries help your website look great on any device, from smartphones to large screens. And this is generally referred to as responsive web design.
5. Media
As we are talking about responsive web design and development, media is one of the major aspects. We must consider adding videos and photos which are responsive. If you don’t understand how to do so, contact a top web development firm that can help you in achieving this. To make your videos and images you can adjust your CSS code and easily achieve this.
6. Typography
Font sizes are often defined in pixels by web developers. Static websites can use these, but responsive websites require a responsive font. The font size must adapt to the width of the parent container. This is required for the font to change to screen size and be viewable on a variety of devices. Look for the rem’s unit in the CSS3 specification. It works in the same way as the em unit, but it is applied to the HTML element. As a result, the HTML font size must be reset in the code:
html { font-size:100%; }
Now define the font sizes:
@media (min-width: 640px) { body {font-size:1rem;} }
@media (min-width:960px) { body {font-size:1.2rem;} }
@media (min-width:1100px) { body {font-size:1.5rem;} }
Author
Nishant