The days of accessing web content strictly via a PC or laptop are well behind us, with many internet users primarily accessing web content through their mobile or tablet-style devices.

Yet, a lot of domain owners are slow to recognise this change and they are neglecting to consider the responsiveness of their website and how their content is displayed on these smaller user devices.

The way to improve this is through responsive web design!

Rather than piling your content into a single column or a set layout and hoping that it looks just as good on someone’s phone as it does on their computer; responsive web design ensures that your content looks great no matter the device the user happens to be using.

We’ll flesh out exactly what responsive web design consists of, but in a nutshell responsive design is an approach to design that adapts your content to best fit the screen size of whichever device it is being accessed with.

Take a desktop screen for example, you may have your content lumped into an array of columns that span the width of a typical desktop screen. But if we were to look at this content on a phone without responsive design, the content would appear crammed.

Yet a responsive approach allows us to deliver distinct layouts of your content depending on the device that the user is viewing it from. Optimising content for mobile has never been more important with mobile web traffic now accounting for over half of all search traffic.

If your website’s landing page is not optimised for mobile users, then the likelihood that they navigate to further pages on your domain is increasingly unlikely. Neglecting to implement responsive design will only lead to a poor ROI on your advertisement expenditure.

The key elements to responsive design are as follows:

• Media Query Ranges: It is important to set this range based on the specific needs of your domain’s design, with increasing pixel values for larger screen sizes

• Fluid Size Layouts: You need to establish different sizes for separate layout elements depending on either the query range or your page’s unique breakpoint

• Responsive Image Content: Use a changing size value on your images so that they remain formatted to fit the page across various screen sizes

• Adaptive Typographies: Ensure that your font adapts to the user’s screen size, so your written content is legible and best fits the device’s screen

• CSS and HTML Optimisation: All of the above responsive features depend on synthesising HTML and CSS which dictate content and structure elements and the design and display of those elements, respectively

By utilising responsive design, whether through selecting a responsive WordPress template or consulting a web developer, you will be optimising your domain and content for any user experience. 

Of course, this will falter if your content isn’t equally as good, so optimising your content for user engagement is also important. And by combining the two you’re ideally setting yourself up for previously unimagined domain success!