Responsive Website Design: Creating Websites for all Devices
Web Design is, you guessed it, the act of designing and developing a website for the Internet. Designing a website involves a range of skills, such as software coding and development, however, the main concept of web design is user interface and experience. This includes aspects like the website’s appearance, functionality, layout and content.
Designing a website involves a range of different disciplines, such as graphic design, user interface design and coding. Common coding languages used for website design are HTML, CSS and JavaScript, this creates the underlying structure of a website and makes it functional. This includes the creation of pages, adding interactive features and optimising the site for search engines (SEO). There is a whole list of different types of web design, but the one that usually proves the most popular (and is a service that we offer at SEO Flatrate), is Responsive Website Design.
Why is it Important to Have a Well-Designed Website as a Business?
A business website is extremely important for a company’s brand and image. The design of a website is often the first thing that a consumer will look at and it may affect their decision on choosing your business or another competitor. If a website’s load speeds are slow, visually unappealing and difficult to navigate, a visitor is unlikely to stay for long. A website that focuses on creating a positive user experience will encourage a user to explore more content and engage further with the site.
Having a website that is designed professionally can expand your customer base. Having well-written content on your web pages is a great opportunity to enhance your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), this will place you higher on the search engine ranking pages (SERPs) and will in turn increase traffic to your website and business.
What to Consider when Hiring Web Design Services
When contacting a professional website designer, it is a good idea to have some initial ideas of what you are looking for. This involves finding a service that offers the type of website you require and having an idea about the intentions and visual aesthetics of your website.
What type of website do you require?
There are many different types of websites and as a business owner, you will need to decide what is best for your consumer base and own business needs. Here is a summary of some of the most popular:
Single Page Design – This is where all of the information is located on one webpage, this can be as long as you wish. This creates one linear journey for a user but isn’t very interactive.
Static Websites – This type of website is built with the intention of very little user interaction; these sites are often used to relay information instead of selling goods and services. A static website is usually created with more basic code and has a set number of web pages.
Dynamic Sites – Dynamic websites allow for more user interaction and use more complex code. These websites usually have a slower loading speed due to their intricate model but have the benefit of being more engaging.
Fixed Page Websites – Fixed design pages have a strict resolution and don’t change depending on the size of a screen. This allows for consistency but can make information difficult to read.
Liquid Design - This website manipulates its layout by shrinking and stretching the entire page to fit the size of a screen. This can cause a site to have very small or misshapen text and information if a screen is too small or large.
Responsive Web Design – A responsive website will change the layout of content depending on the size of a user’s screen. The webpage will manipulate itself by wrapping text and changing image size to best fit a user’s screen. This is different to liquid design as the individual content changes size instead of the entire page. With there being over 7 billion mobile users worldwide, it would be detrimental to your business to not have a website that can adapt itself to smaller screens.
The Website’s Function and Visual Design
As a business, you will need to decide the main aims of your website and who you want to target. Do you want to use your website to advertise, inform, entertain or sell products and services? This will also help you to decide what type of website design you require. Furthermore, you will want to consider how you can give users the best experience possible, this involves making the webpages accessible and easy to navigate, as well as ensuring your site has a good loading speed. After all this, you can start to consider how you would like your site to look with colour schemes, strong imagery and typography. If you are using a responsive website design, it is important to ensure that all of your images are scalable for all devices so that they do not appear pixelated when being stretched to fit a larger screen.
Why Responsive Web Design could be for You
A responsive website will always change its layout and information display depending on the size of your device. This means whether a website is being viewed on a mobile phone or a desktop computer, the website will change and adapt to fit the user’s device. This can be great if you have a business that is targeted at a range of audiences as the website will appear concise and easy to use for all users.
Responsive website design is a crucial investment to help build awareness of a company’s brand and allow as many visitors to access your website as possible. Google will now even penalise websites that don’t use responsive design as more people are accessing the internet through their phones and require content that is scalable. Responsive web design can also save time and money; instead of hiring web design services to build multiple different websites for each device, a responsive website will mean you only need one site for every possible device. With technology always advancing and screen sizes always changing, responsive web design allows you to stay on top.
Responsive Website Design for all Devices
If you require professional Responsive Website Design or are considering our Rent-A-Website services, then contact us on +44 (0)1202 911141 or email support@seoflatrate.co.uk.
Comments