The volatile growth of online application access over mobile phones and other hand held devices, has given way to big brands and their marketers for optimizing customer engagement across all digital domains. This led to the increased popularity of the mobile versions for desktop web applications. But this trend was prominent only momentarily. The mobile experience of web apps often lacks in a few very important areas: a rationale branding, and content elements. Also, it ties up the valuable staff with the budgetary constraints as they are responsible for the management of two versions of a website.
Here comes the responsive web design. It came with a solution to all these problems, by delivering information from a common code base. Thereby, it was able to recognize and adapt to the mobile devices from the same URL.
However, developing a responsive website is not the only factor that guarantees business success. If done incorrectly, even a responsive site can bring in as many challenges as they can settle. Sometimes, even these can prove to be slow, complex, expensive, and time-consuming. It may also unmask certain structural (development and testing) challenges.
Here we discuss how to best optimize our responsive web designs.
Before you begin: A successful implementation is a result of appropriate alignment of business and development goals. Thus, a clear understanding of the following would prove to highly beneficial: analysis of mobile traffic patterns, creation of device priority lists, review of information flow and content. This will also pave way for the development teams to progress faster. And, improve the overall time-to-market by addressing speed, closely associating the team working with design and development, and site acceleration via collaborating with development frameworks and prototyping tools.
Outlining the customer’s experience: Site optimization is all about the behavior and composition of your end-users. Remember that implementation of responsive web designs is done with techniques that may not be suitable for the browsers that have now become obsolete. It is crucial to identify the top browsers where the site will be accessed, in order to determine the breakpoints along which should you design the website.
Describe your content strategy: Content Preparation for responsive websites is a major challenge. Therefore, it is often believed that implementation of responsive websites is more about handling content strategies rather than design. Give high priority to the functions and other information that are required to systematize your mobile view more efficiently. Thereafter, scale up the cleaner view of the site for bigger screens. A triumphant experience is not about depriving of any utility. Users expect performance from any and every device that they are holding. This involves filtering of the search results, analyzing reviews, delivering to the wish lists, and check-out. These should be available globally.
The Code Base: A single code base for responsive web designs can be bulky, and therefore slow to load. You can consider some of the tips below, suggested for an optimum mobile experience.
- Load high priority content first. This will create the impression of faster performance.
- Use server-side technology for rendering images, sized according to the device.
- Using open fonts rather than custom can reduce the overall page weight.
These few optimization tips, and several others will largely assist you with doing your responsive web application development in the most feasible way.
