How to create a Professional Responsive Website?
By: Iram Khan
Tags: Website Development, Freelance Writing, Freelancing

A website is only a simple domain that consists of web pages, yet it is crucial for any business to establish oneself. Having an online presence opens up new opportunities and benefits that otherwise wouldn’t be available. A website could play a key role in your marketing strategies and can provide your business a lot more traction and exposure.

A website or social media account can be accessed around the clock (24/7/365) by anyone. People don’t have to walk into a store or even make a phone call, so having a website ensures that they can take the most convenient route towards you.

Having a web presence also empowers your credibility with the information you provide. Potential customers will have a much easier time in trusting you. It also drives your sales because you can sell your products and services online as well. Sometimes the better it looks the more credible you’ll seem to your users.

Web design has changed a lot over the years as mobile devices hit the market. In fact, about 40% of online activity is driven by mobile devices. So it is important to have your website optimized for them in order to ensure the best experience for your users.

Websites that are optimized for both PC’s and mobile devices are called responsive websites. They have the ability to change their layout and rearrange all the elements of a website if thescreen size or the window size on your PC changes. Thanks to responsive web designs, you can have a single website that looks amazing no matter what kind of device people use to access it.

Today, we are going to tell you the ins and outs of responsive web design. Why it is important for your website to be responsive and what technologies you can implement to create it.

What are Responsive Websites and Why Is Having one Important?

Responsive web design enables a desktop website to respond to the user’s behavior, in terms of the device and the web browser they use to view your site. It’s a practice that implements flexible layouts, grids and images along with a resourceful use of CSS.

By using responsive web design, we’re not forced to create a new website for each group of users. It implements fluid layouts, scripts and media queries that change the look and layout of a website with ease.

Once you have a fully responsive website set up, users can view it on their PC, laptop, iPad, and tablet and on a wide range of other devices, such as phones. So basically, a responsive website will automatically respond to the user’s technological preferences. A website like this will automatically switch to the appropriate resolution, font size and accommodate forthe device’s scripting abilities. So no matter what kind of device this website is viewed from, it will look amazing or at least the way the creator wants it to.

The key concept is to have everything adjustable to specific needs.

Adjustable screen resolution is one of the key aspects of this technology, because it ensures that the website changes according to the device it is viewed on. This is particularly important, as a new device with a new screen size comes out almost every day. These advanced devices and smartphones even have the landscape view option, which would require a completely different page layout in itself. It is these situations, in which we have to have our designs as flexible as possible, but doing so would mean that we have to optimize for hundreds of different screen sizes. That’s just too much, but we have to deal with the situation accordingly.

The solution is making every bit of the website flexible. Every image, text, button and each element of the site can be adjusted automatically. This enables devices to instantly change from portrait view to landscape and the website will still look the way it was supposed to.

How To Build a Responsive Website

Responsive web design has become a basic necessity for most web pages, because of the ever growing number of smartphones being used. Over the years, most web development technologies have implemented responsive web design and now we have some pretty sophisticated options for creating such a site for ourselves.

We can either code a responsive website ourselves with HTML and CSS or create one with a CMS platform or a website builder app. Regardless of your skill level; you have a way of creating a professional looking and responsive website.

Using a CMS to Create a Responsive Website

A CMS (content management platform) lets you update and manage your website’s content. No matter what kind of website you’re running, you’re better off using a CMS to keep its content up to date. It will run on the backend of the website and you can manage the content and the visual layout of your website.Most CMS platforms (at least the most popular ones) offer users the ability to create unique and professional looking websites with various themes and plugins. Looking at them from a design perspective, they offer great possibilities for responsive web design. Most of the themes they use are fully responsive right out of the box.

Below we’ll give the top three CMS platforms that can be used to create responsive websites:

WordPress

WordPress started out as a simple blogging platform but has been expanded, enabling its users to create just about any kind of website they set their mind to. It runs about 20% of websites on the Internet and has thousands of fully responsive themes. Whatever kind of website you might think of building, you’ll find a professional looking theme or template that will you can use to make it come to life

Using Website Builders for Building Responsive Websites

A huge shift took place in how websites are being created, thanks to the many new age web design tools that are being released. Thanks to these design tools, web designers no longer have to know coding to create beautiful websites. Every site is created according to the latest standards and is compatible with multiple platforms.

Modern website builders let designers create clean W3C compliant codes by using drag and drop features. You’ll have an easy time creating a responsive website for any screen size and platform. I’ll show you three of the most feature rich and advanced web design tools that you can use to create complex and awesome looking responsive web designs.

Wix.com is a leading cloud-based website building platform that makes it easy for everyone to create stunning, professional and usable websites. Users can choose from a large set of templates and customize them for their needs.Wix is one of the most popular and well-established website building platforms, having over 90 million users worldwide.

Wix is beginner friendly, enabling non-technical users to create their own websites with no need of learning any programming language or web design. With their drag and drop site builder everyone can set up different type of website: simple business site, blog, online shop, photography portfolio, online CV, event or other.

Conclusion

A lot of thought and work has been put into making responsive web design and it has reached a point where almost every new website integrates it to some extent. It is a key component of any web design as more and more mobile devices are being used.

Even those users who don’t have coding knowledge can use it, thanks to CMS platforms and various web design tools.

I hope this article helped you wrap your head around responsive web design and how you can use it!