Now a days, all website owners want their website to be responsive for all types of devices. They want to bring their websites to screen sizes, so they can introduce their users with a more professional and appealing appearance on their website. The field of web designing and web development brings in endless opportunities for new innovations, and we can’t hold ourselves to upgrade to such technologies ASAP. The big multinational firms like Nokia, Microsoft, etc. all are turning towards the responsive web design, in order to pace up with the trends, and attract more customers.
1. Navigation in Responsive Web Design
All users knew regarding navigation even before the responsive designs were made-up. Now a days, website do have top three bars within the corner that are effective navigation buttons, but this still might be difficult to navigate. It gets more difficult with a complex structure, so navigation needs to be responsive and fixed.
Solution : You should spend more time in order to make navigation easier. For this, analyze your website and understand your visitors browsing behavior. Developers can test navigation on multiple products to improve it.
Responsive Web Design Testing Tool
2. Images and Icons
Images are crucial to a user’s experience on the web. In responsive design, images and icons have to be flexible to allow users to enjoy the graphics on high pixel density devices, which are becoming more widespread. Making sure the images don’t look blurry and poorly scaled up is the goal of every designer and developer.
Solution : Lazy loading images can help optimize browser rendering and reduce the number of HTTP round trips by deferring the loading of images that are not in the client’s view. Making icons scalable (using the SVG format, which keeps icons light yet high-quality) and retina-ready can also help users enjoy the website without loss of quality on any device.
3. Page Loading / Performance
If a website is slow to load due to the size of the images, we should follow proper image compression methods. We could also try one of the following solutions:
- Use alternative image formats that have better quality with better compression rate.
- Convert single color icons to icon fonts using icon font generators like IcoMoon App.
- Convert vector files to SVG format.
- Combine several small images into a single image (image sprite).
- Optimize images using optimization tools (Photoshop or GIMP) or online tools like TinyPNG.
- Use CSS tricks (instead of images) to create gradients, shadows, round corners, buttons, and other elements.
4. Conversion of fixed width sites
Problem faced by the designers is to update the code of fixed width site so as to make it responsive.
Solution : You can decide on any of the two choicess. First solution is that you can rebuild stylesheets and templates. Second option is that you can reverse your existing coding.
For smaller sites, it is possible to reverse the coding but on bigger sites it is not possible to reverse the coding, therefore, it is better to rebuild your site.
5. Dispalying Data on Small Screens
You may have data tables on your website, and displaying them on tiny screens could become a problem. They have many rows and columns as well, and you need to make it user-friendly for smaller screens.
Solution : There are many solutions to display the grid layout and creating a smaller table that doesn’t call for horizontal scrolling; building more compact pie charts out of tables; replacing tables with smaller versions while offering a link to the full version; hiding unimportant elements on small screens with a dropdown menu with access to the full table; rainbow tables where colors are used instead of columns; and even flipping the table on its side to make it fit.
6. Hiding and Removing the Content
Websites with complicated UI elements, advanced search features, multi-step forms, data tables, calculators, dashboards with third-party scripts, and so on often pose a problem because they simply contain too much information. The approach so far has been to hide or remove content from users, but many individuals feel they deserve access to all information, even if they are browsing on a small device. In some cases, there is no way for a user to get the full version of the website they are browsing.
Solution : Designers should plan, and sort out how the content should be arranged so he shouldn’t force himself to hiding the content. Designers should optimize the site by removing unwanted drafts from the website, and focus on the necessary content. A designer may be thinking of embellishing at this moment, but he should focus on the content that needs priority.
7. Tables
Problems related with the suitable utilization of the tables have been noticed by more than one designer. These problems are more common when they did have complex and important information including images. These problems are also seen whenever the designs are required to handle larger number of columns and rows. Meeting these problems is quite a big challenge for the responsive designers.
Solution : Use of responsive tables and separating the tables out of their containers can be good options for a designer working with Responsive Web Design. However, many experts of responsive web design do not recommend hiding of content from the users as it can be unfair to strip them from the content.
8. Internet Explorer
When working with mobile-first techniques, your website might not display properly on older versions of IE. In these cases, developers should find a way to support an older website on mobile devices.
Solution : Although Internet Explorer may not be used by a lot of users, but still there must be a solution for this browser. Designers should focus on changing the page layouts so that they run on the browser window. This could be done by using JavaScript. Designers should also maintain the original layout, while making the code flexible for older version of IE. A great alternative is using the IE Style sheet along with elementary styling.
9. Long Testing Period
Since you are going to serve the same template to multiple devices and screen sizes, it means, you will have to test the website for a long period of time. You will have to check a single website on multiple devices and fix things carefully so that the changes in the code don’t interfere with the website’s rendering process on another device.
Yes, we understand this is a tedious and tiring process but we will have to do it to ensure that the website is getting rendered seamlessly and perfectly on all possible devices.
Moreover, you just can’t have different designing elements on the interface wherever you like because you will always have to keep in mind that you will have to reposition all those elements later so that the design does not look clumsy when accessed from smaller screens.
