Making It Mobile: Adapting Your Site For All Devices

March 2, 2018

Over the last few years, smartphones, tablets, and other small devices have taken the world by storm. Providing people with access to tools once only found on computers, these sorts of products have changed the way that people browse the web, and a huge portion of your website’s users will be part of this revolution. Of course, though, all of these techy gadgets have different sized screens, making the design of your site incredibly hard. To help you out with this, this post will be exploring responsive web design, and some of the ways which you can use it on your own site.
Picking The Right Theme
Nowadays, most people won’t built their own website from scratch, even if they are a developer. Instead, to make things faster, services like WordPress will often be used for this job, enabling businesses to build their site within a matter of weeks. One of the best parts of these services is the themes you get with them. Most of these will be responsive, though some will be better than others. It’s always a good idea to check out demos before you choose this part of the site, as this will give you the best idea of what can be done with it.
Using The Right Tools
Along with picking a theme which works, there will also be loads of tools out there which can help you with this work. There are loads of page building plugins out there, and most of these can be used to hide and show different elements depending on the device being used. Alternatively, you could also consider using CSS @media rules to figure out the size of the display. This sort of method will often give you more freedom, while taking more time as a result.
Condensing Your Data
When you look around at various mobile websites, you will quickly see that they all follow similar design principles. One of the most important of these is the amount of information you have on display. Being a smaller screen, having the same text on mobile and desktop will often make the site look cluttered. To solve this issue, it will be worth going through all of the content you have to squish it into something manageable.
Getting It Tested
Finally, as the last area to consider, it’s very important to get your website tested before these changes are launched. With so many different device types out there, it will be easy to make mistakes which leave it looking bad in certain places. To avoid this sort of issue, responsive web design auditing is a very popular service. While this will mean paying someone to look at the site, it will ensure that the work you’ve done is good enough for the Internet.
Hopefully, with this in mind, it will start to get a lot easier to understand what needs to be done to make your site responsive. A lot of people find it hard to cover this sort of area, with web design be an incredibly complicated field.

Mark Asquith

That British podcast guy, Mark is co-founder of Captivate.fm, the world's only growth-oriented podcast host. A Harvard, TEDx, Podcast Movement and Podfest speaker (amongst many more!), he's a wildly approachable Brit and Star Wars/DC Comics geek.

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