Some Basic Principles For Designing A Responsive Website

In today’s world of multi-screen displays such as laptops and mobile devices, responsive website design is an important technique to be used so that your site is compatible with all types of devices.

Below are some tips we’ve learned over several years of building responsive sites that we’d like to share.  These tips are intended to help you make your websites user friendly regardless of the device being used. We want to make a complicated design process much less complication and will try to keep it simpler and just concentrate on the layouts.

Everything Is Dependent On The Content

The flow

The content automatically goes to the next line vertically as the screen becomes smaller. Anything below what will fit into available space gets moved down. This process is referred to as the flow. It may sound tricky if you’re used to only designing with points and pixels. But it’s easy once you get used to it.

Relative units

For a responsive design, we need flexible units that work on all kinds of screens, because pixel density gets varied according to the canvas on each device. This is where we use the relative units like percents. That is, if you want to make something 50% wide, then it always takes half of the size of your view port.

Breakpoints

These are the predefined points which makes the layout change according to the screen size. That is, it manages to show only one column on a mobile device while you have three columns on the desktop. You can use different CSS properties for different breakpoints. It depends on the content where you want to put one. You may need to add a break point when a sentence breaks. If you properly understand what influences what, then it will be easier to tackle the situation if it gets messy.

Nested objects

Don’t make too many elements dependent on each other. It will get difficult to control. This is where wrapping elements in a container come in handy. It makes the things easily understandable and keeps it clear. When you don’t want to scale content like buttons and logos, you can use static units like pixels.

These are some of the important things which may help a designer to create a responsive web design.

Contact Red Spot Design for quality responsive websites. Call (214) 432-1608 for details. Visit http://www.redspotdesign.com/ today.

Why You Need an Updated Website

The internet has come a long way in the past two decades. Recently, we’ve seen a surge in quality among many small or local business websites. A quality site empowers small to medium sized businesses to take on the bigger players. At the same time, several websites have become out dated and have lost their attractiveness and/or functionality because of their reluctance to follow the most recent trends. We understand the reluctance when you don’t have access to someone you can trust to properly update and maintain your site.

Your online customers can easily make out if your website looks outdated or doesn’t offer a satisfactory experience. A good way to test your web site to make sure it is up-to-date is see how it displays on your smart phone. Do you like the way your business looks on your phone? If you’re your answer in no, you can be sure your customers won’t like it either!

Website Not Optimized

In today’s connected world, the majority of people access websites with their smart phones. If a web site is slow loading or seems disproportionate on a smartphone, it means it has not been optimized for mobile phones. This can cost you customers.

Unclear Message

If the site is not displaying properly on a mobile device, your online visitors will only be on your site for a brief while. So, it’s vital that you make sure you get the message about your products and services across quickly in the most effective way. If you are not able to provide the information quickly and obviously, visitors will simply click away to another website. To avoid losing visitors make sure the main page contains all the essential navigation and functionality and the message is in plain and easy terms. If you feel your website is appropriately designed, you may still ask for a second opinion from close friends who will be more honest in their review of your website. Also, have it tested on multiple devices as well as browsers.

Difficult to Navigate

The website should be simple to navigate. The visitors must not ever get ‘stuck’ in some part of the web site and find it difficult to go back. The navigation bar is typically towards the top of the web site. It should offer the user easy navigation.

If your web site is well navigable, customers will spend more time on it, and this increases their visit duration, which can result in increased business conversions or product purchases.

Doesn’t Look Fashionable

It will be obvious to your visitors if your web site is outdated. To remain competitive in the online market, your site should look current and have updated information. It’s best to seek the unbiased opinion of your friends. This can offer you some valuable insight into what should be done to make it more appealing.

Poor Conversion Rate

When a potential client visits your web site, you are likely hoping they engage in some kind of activity such as responding to a Call-to-Action (CTA), submit a query form, sign up for a newsletter, purchase a product or perform some sales related action. If you’re obtaining less response and your conversion rate is on the decline, then there’s cause for concern. It implies that your web site isn’t providing the client what they are  wanting to find or it just doesn’t have the attractiveness of your competitor’s sites. Once you’re aware that something is wrong and it’s have a negative impact on your conversion rates, it’s time to seriously consider a website redesign.

Lots of Bling

Make sure that the site doesn’t have too many bells and whistles. Too many graphics, pop ups or scripts don’t impress your visitors, it just slows down your web site and drives visitors away.

It’s much better to have a simple but optimized website. It loads faster and conveys the message to the web visitors without any further hiccups.

For a free professional website design evaluation contact us today:  214-432-1608

How to Make a Website Customer Friendly

How do online customers use the internet? It’s an easy question, however a question many small-business owners forget to address while working on their website.

Far too often, web design firms get so focused on the latest tech innovations they lose sight of the basic and often simple needs and expectations of their potential customers.

From ipads and smartphones to oversized video display units and laptops, how do you deliver your message to your customer online today? Is the site easy to understand and easy to navigate?

If you have a website, you must have some kind of metrics or analytic programs available to you. This is a easy way of tracking visitors on your website, as well as an additional feature offered by most applications  to review browser information. This gives you reliable insight into what internet browsers and operating structures your clients use and what they see on the screen set on their monitors. These analytics can assist you in making  a decision to upgrade your site to deliver content that displays properly regardless of the device being used to access your site.

Mobile Friendly

When your website is visited on a mobile web browser, how does it look? Does the information you want to deliver visible without having to move their screen? Here are a couple of things to bear in mind while thinking about the effectiveness of your website.

The first thing to remember is that photo-heavy websites take longer to down load on mobile phones. The second one is that flash animation can’t be properly displayed on all phones.

However, you don’t have to sacrifice special features on your business website, but you may want to discuss with your website developer ways to create the responsive design version of the site for your mobile audience. With studies showing some 60% of internet searches now being done on a wide variety of mobile devices, proper display of the site to those visitors is crucial and simply can’t be ignored.

Print style

Most websites built before about 2012 were designed with features meant to work well on a desktop or a laptop screen, including being able to print out relevant parts of the site. But with the huge growth of mobile internet, and the fact that mobile may involve a wide range of platforms, with updating the site many people in your target market may find no way to print your pages or articles. This is a simple fix but may be an expensive mistake if not addressed. You may want to provide this option if you have details on your site that clients would want to print. This is a feature important to many types of online businesses such as magazines, restaurants displaying menus, educational and informative site and often just basic information about you or your products and services.

User Style

You may have intended to have website convey a certain look and feel, but consider this: how many different devices are visiting your website and not being able to experience that look and feel you intended when the site was first built?  There could be a large portion of your target market not getting what you wanted them to have resulting in the loss of potential sales all due to a simple upgrade.

Ease of Use

A lot of online sales is about showing your clients that you understand them and are flexible to their needs. Begin that conversation by giving your audience a solid user experience by making you’re pages display properly. Font styles can be a great place to start. Provide users with a simple and obvious way to increase the size of your font to make reading content easier for them.

Upgrading your site shouldn’t be expensive or a daunting prospect for you. No matter the cost of updating the site, NOT upgrading and failing to show what your customers expect to see is likely to cost far more in lost sales.

Contact us today at 214-432-1608 or complete our free online quote form.

6 Reasons Why You Need an Updated Website To Make Sales

The internet has come a long way in the past two decades. Recently, we’ve seen a surge in quality among many small or local business websites. A quality site empowers small to medium sized businesses to take on the bigger players. At the same time, several websites have become out dated and have lost their attractiveness and/or functionality because of their reluctance to follow the most recent trends. We understand the reluctance when you don’t have access to someone you can trust to properly update and maintain your site.

Your online customers can easily make out if your website looks outdated or doesn’t offer a satisfactory experience. A good way to test your web site to make sure it is up-to-date is see how it displays on your smart phone. Do you like the way your business looks on your phone? If you’re your answer in no, you can be sure your customers won’t like it either!

Website Not Optimized

In today’s connected world, the majority of people access websites with their smart phones. If a web site is slow loading or seems disproportionate on a smartphone, it means it has not been optimized for mobile phones. This can cost you customers.

Unclear Message

If the site is not displaying properly on a mobile device, your online visitors will only be on your site for a brief while. So, it’s vital that you make sure you get the message about your products and services across quickly in the most effective way. If you are not able to provide the information quickly and obviously, visitors will simply click away to another website. To avoid losing visitors make sure the main page contains all the essential navigation and functionality and the message is in plain and easy terms. If you feel your website is appropriately designed, you may still ask for a second opinion from close friends who will be more honest in their review of your website. Also, have it tested on multiple devices as well as browsers.

Difficult to Navigate

The website should be simple to navigate. The visitors must not ever get ‘stuck’ in some part of the web site and find it difficult to go back. The navigation bar is typically towards the top of the web site. It should offer the user easy navigation.

If your web site is well navigable, customers will spend more time on it, and this increases their visit duration, which can result in increased business conversions or product purchases.

Doesn’t Look Fashionable

It will be obvious to your visitors if your web site is outdated. To remain competitive in the online market, your site should look current and have updated information. It’s best to seek the unbiased opinion of your friends. This can offer you some valuable insight into what should be done to make it more appealing.

Poor Conversion Rate

When a potential client visits your web site, you are likely hoping they engage in some kind of activity such as responding to a Call-to-Action (CTA), submit a query form, sign up for a newsletter, purchase a product or perform some sales related action. If you’re obtaining less response and your conversion rate is on the decline, then there’s cause for concern. It implies that your web site isn’t providing the client what they are wanting to find or it just doesn’t have the attractiveness of your competitor’s sites. Once you’re aware that something is wrong and it’s have a negative impact on your conversion rates, it’s time to seriously consider a website redesign.

Lots of Bling

Make sure that the site doesn’t have too many bells and whistles. Too many graphics, pop ups or scripts don’t impress your visitors, it just slows down your web site and drives visitors away.

It’s much better to have a simple but optimized website. It loads faster and conveys the message to the web visitors without any further hiccups.

For a free professional website design evaluation contact us today:  214-432-1608