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How Can Responsive Web Design Be A Part Of Your Digital Marketing Strategy?

With the growing market of smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices, responsive web design has become a vital part of developing digital marketing strategies. But, web design trends change every year and companies must adapt if they want to keep on top.

 

However, whether you are own start-up and want to build your first website or maybe you simpley want to update an existing one, you should keep responsive web design in mind.

 

And don’t worry if you know nothin about web design or responsive web design. In this topic you will learn about:

  • What is responsive web design?
  • What impact does it have on your digital marketing?
  • What is the importance of responsive web design for SEO?
  • How to build a responsive web design for your digital platform?
  • How can responsive web design grow your digital business?

 

What is responsive web design?

Responsive web design or RWD is a web development approach that ensures an aestheticly pleasing and consistent appearance of your layouts, texts, and images on every device. In other words, RWD determines how these elements are arranged on a f.ex. smartphone, tablet, laptop or desktopn, in a way that whichever screen you look at, your experience as a user stays the same.

 

So, when developing a website either for yourself or a customer, there are three key elements you should consider implementing for a responsive web design:

  • Fluid Grids – the website will be based on a flexible grid foundation
  • Flexible Visuals – the way to improve flexibility itself
  • Media Queries – different views must be adapted within the correspondence to contexts.

 

Fluid Grid – adapts across devices

When using Fluid grids, web designers separate the layout into multiple columns and rows, which create a grid. This simplifies the design by offering custom arrangement and alignment tailored to content and screen size.

 

Basically, to ensure a richer user’s experience on each device, the grid helps the content t move and rearange, in order to correspond to the available space or screen size.

 

Developments of the website and its fluid grid
Source: designveloper.com

 

Traditionally, every aspect of a grid was determined by pixels. That includes their position, width, height, padding, etc. But with fluid grids, these values are defined in percentages instead which allows the grid to resize and even move based on your device’s screen.

 

So, to achieve a fluid grid, it is necessary to define the following:

  • Columns, Rows, and Sizes within the Grids
  • Vertical and Horizontal gaps, where the spacing between the grid elements must be considered
  • The flow algorithm for newly added elements

 

In fact, the grid system limits the application of CSS classes that define size, space, and alignment itself. Overusing these layers on responsive web design can cost time as well as make it more complicated to code on your own.

 

So, a fluid grid contributes to balance and ensures a consistent appearance and feel across the various devices. Moreover, it is a free alternative for designers that create one size fits for all designs while updating new versions.

 

Flexible visuals

Another essential alternative to the website design is to fully adapt along with the screen size as well as the visual content.

 

To prevent certain commands which limit visual spaces on smaller devices such as laptops or mobiles, web designers can simply crop them by using CSS. The CSS overflow property allows designers to crop the image in a way that fits with the screen size.

 

Crop images that fits within screen sizes
Source: designveloper.com
Media queries

Media queries contribute to the website to detect the user’s device type in order to present suitable proportions across the screen.

 

While media queries simplify building multiple layouts based on user-side display parameters they also deal with the browser display including size, page orientation, colors, and resolutions, etc.

 

However, media queries operate only if there is an implementation of fluid grids and flexible images.

 

In fact, media queries verify the physical characteristics of the device in order to check its condition of distinct media features by allowing designers to create more flexible adapts to all different mediums as well as providing a more tailored experience for the user.

 

Media queries verify the physical characteristics of the device
Source: designveloper.com

 

In addition, now we know what responsive web design is and how to put it in a way with the website so that it automatically scales its content and elements to match the screen size on the devices it is viewed.

 

However, developing a website the user will encounter certain challenges as well as will have advantages of responsive web design.

 

Advantages of Responsive Web Design

Save Cost for Maintenance

Responsive Web has one consistent version that operates compatibly across the devices in order for designers to fix, upgrade and proceed with new versions with them once.

 

Meanwhile, when the website has two versions on the desktop and mobile, the costs for maintenance and upgrading are doubled.

 

Effective SEO and Content Management

RWD (Responsive Web Design) provides only one URL in order to reduce the SEO cost while improving and managing the content.

 

Consistent Brand Awareness

Having RWD as a part of a digital marketing strategy allows the web to run consistently across the devices while ensuring its content presence and identity with the target audience.

 

Meanwhile, increasing engagement with the audience improves brand awareness and its digital presence in the marketplace.

 

Utility in Manipulation

The Unity of UI provides the website with user-friendly browsing and navigation functions in order to trigger users to engage longer with the site.

 

Optimizes Page Speed

Having complex effects and slides on the website might deteriorate the process of loading page data. RWD compresses the files while offloading heavy data in order to speed up the page loading time.

 

Challenges of Responsive Web Design

Time-consuming

implementing a responsive web design focuses on a plethora of different techniques and tasks so, the preparation and requirements of different scripts is a time-consuming process.

 

However, well-structured flows deliver smoother and more efficient workloads for long-term use.

 

Diminish the value of communicative messages

RWD might decrease the value of delivered messages while cutting down the image size or constraining the display of some information.

 

Also, designers might have requirements towards subtle aesthetics to arrange the layout in order for CSS to present the best visual tailoring across the screens.

 

In addition, the practice makes perfect sense towards understanding how to improve a good Responsive Web Design service in order to optimize the design on multiple devices and increase engagement with the target audience.

 

Responsive Web Design importance on digital marketing strategy

Despite the incredible growth of mobile device usage, most business websites still have not improved their mobile-friendly service. The website is the primary point for the brand to reach its target audience and demonstrate its expertise in the marketplace.

 

So, the website design is crucial for a digital plan because the company needs to ensure that they are putting the best efforts into creating an effective web design in order to inspire customer trust and win their confidence.

 

In the digital industry, website design shapes not just the image and identity of the company but also gives a huge impact on the functionality of the site and its user experience.

 

Nowadays, users hold high expectations towards the websites they visit. They want to see a beautiful design as well as get a positive experience on the site.

 

To promote the brand and ensure its success, responsive web design is an important component that improves the digital marketing strategy to have a competitive advantage in the marketplace as well as web design impacts branding.

 

Selecting all the different elements of the website design including colour and graphics can be an effective strategy that builds brand recognition and improves its market position from a web design perspective.

 

Meanwhile, the website’s design has a huge impact on conversion rates and increases engagement with the target group. A well-designed, optimized, and maintained website improves business and marketing operations in order to meet customers’ needs, and develop its digital reputation through the marketplace.

 

Responsive Web Design improves SEO

To achieve long-term objectives for the website you need to think about how effectively to approach web design with Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

 

New trends in web design come and go but your digital presence and brand recognition is something the company wants to maintain over time.

 

Focusing more on website functionality and user experience, the web design improves SEO while optimizing the website for leading search engines that people are using to find your business. Including on-page and off-page as a part of optimization techniques determines a positive user experience with the brand.

 

On-page SEO determines important aspects that can be developed for search engines such as adding headlines, meta descriptions, and alt tags in images.

 

Off-page SEO focuses on outside websites on the internet that can be optimized through improving the ranking or building backlinks, and social signals of the website.

 

Besides, with responsive web design, the designers are able to optimize the website for search engines with higher rankings while it is mobile friendly and runs across different devices such as desktop and mobile as well as assists in attaining low bounce rates.

 

In addition, web design has a huge impact on the entire digital marketing strategy as well as affects user experience, branding, and SEO.

 

It plays a vital role in how the brand is perceived and received in front of the eyes of customers and its market.

 

Knowing how to use responsive web design as a part of marketing strategy, the company will have a competitive advantage while increasing its digital presence and engagement with the target audience.

 

Build Responsive Web Design on your own

Website developers and designers put a great emphasis on creating websites and improving their methods to accomplish the highest responsiveness of the website.

 

Responsive web design refers to a design strategy that everyone can learn and develop while sitting at home. Remember that websites without responsive design have a risk of decreasing numbers of users and recognition of your brand.

 

1. Set Responsive Breakpoints

To provide the best user experience the website needs to adapt its content and design throughout a breakpoint.

 

In order for the website to be accessed via devices with different screen sizes and resolutions without content or images being distorted or cut out, the developers have to use responsive breakpoints, sometimes called CSS or media query breakpoints.

 

Meanwhile, the website’s content responds to CSS points and adjusts itself via certain screen sizes.

 

2. Improve a Fluid Grid

The website is built on what is called a fluid grid which positions web elements on the site’s proportion across specific screen sizes while responding and resizing the fit of the screen.

 

A fluid grid is divided into columns including heights and widths where proportions of text and elements depend on the screen size.

 

Using the fluid grid as a part of website development that will keep a site visually consistent across multiple devices the fluid grid manages alignments and enables faster design-related decision-making.

 

3. Take touchscreens into consideration

In order to make the website responsive, the brand needs to include touchscreen functions. Most mobile devices are equipped with touchscreens within the functions of the keyboard. So, a responsive website will calibrate itself while being accessed via touchscreens.

 

To improve the desktop view, each menu item must be large enough to fit the requirements of a touchscreen as well as using images, CTAs, or optimizing these elements to render properly on multiple screens.

 

4. Use typography

Web developers define font sizes and pixels in order to work on static websites while responsive websites need a responsive font. Keep in mind that font size must change within parent container width to make typography adjust to screen size and be readable on multiple devices.

 

In the CSS3 specification, the unit named rems must reset the HTML font size:

 

html { font-size:100%; }

 

Now define the responsive 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;} }

 

5. Use a pre-designed theme or layout to save time

To build a responsive website on exceptionally tight deadlines developers and designers can choose for using a theme or pre-designed layout with built-in responsive properties.

 

Using WordPress as a part of website development designers can be provided with multiple options in this regard (both free and paid) including themes on choosing a colour, branding, and text.

 

6. Test Responsiveness on Real Devices

To make a website mobile responsive developers can tweak the code all they want, but its functionality has to be verified in real user conditions. Once it is coded, the website must be confirmed through a responsive design checker.

 

Meanwhile, to check how a website looks, and if it is responsive enough, designers can use BrowserStack.

 

A responsive web design checker
Source: browserstack.com

 

In fact, entering the website URL of the BrowserStack will show how the site looks on multiple devices including iPhone 11, iPhone 8 Plus, Galaxy Note 20, Galaxy S9 Plus, and more.

 

In addition, following these steps in detail above, everyone is able to create their own responsive website. Meanwhile, the users expect any website to be implemented with every device they own – desktop, tablet, or mobile. A website’s responsive design must align with a certain device resolution otherwise the brand can lose a segment of its target audience

 

A Responsive Web Design benefits for your digital business

When it comes to maintenance of the website, developers do not need multiple URLs for different devices, instead only one URL that looks equally good on all.

 

With over 67% market share, Google prefers responsive web design because the content and one URL is more effective for users to engage, share and link the content implemented on a separate mobile site.

 

Meanwhile, mobile-friendly sites give a huge impact on brand recognition while Google is placing user experience as a first ranking factor as well as having one URL and HTML at the same time makes it easier for Google to categorize and organize digital content.

 

Moreover, responsive design services help to manage the website with hypertext links and allow developers to focus on link outreach with a consolidated Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy.

 

Having good quality content increases results in higher page ranks while responsive web design only needs to be applied to a single site and that improves a higher search engine ranking. In fact, responsive sites are featuring prominently in localized search results to benefit local as well as online retailers.

 

Moreover, to centralize analytics and reporting responsive sites do not have to trace user journeys, conversion paths between websites because analytic tools are developed enough to handle multiple devices and allow for easier monitoring and responsive reporting.

 

Another major benefit of responsive design is that the user has an improved site experience and positive effect on conversion rates as the design approach creates a consistent look and feel.

 

Conclusion

Implementing responsive web design as a part of a digital marketing strategy will help the business to stay ahead of the trends.

 

As the demand for media and mobile-friendly sites is growing the brand must develop strong digital content and its performances in order to have a competitive advantage and increase recognition in the marketplace

 

There are several development techniques that will help in creating a site that adjusts to the user’s screen while a responsive design enhances a user’s browsing experience by creating a flexible web page optimized for any device.

 

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