With Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) specialists scrambling to figure out Google’s algorithm for ranking websites each time there’s a new update to the system, one of the elements which has remained constant in recent years is that of the User Experience (UX). In their continued value-creating services of ranking pages in their search engine, Google is largely moving away from the previously heavy-reliance on keyword or key-phrase density in addition to back-links or incoming signals, while moving more towards rewarding content that provides a great user experience.
One of the most important fundamental building blocks of providing a great user experience is responsive design. It is especially important for eCommerce websites, most successful companies hire firms like WebEnertia (visit page) to develop their responsive websites. A responsive website is one that generally looks and operates the same across all platforms over which it’s accessed and across all devices. Its design can optimize a user’s browsing experience by creating a responsive and flexible web page.
How to approach responsive web design
If you’re a web designer similar to those at the Connective Web Design team, then you might want to invest some time, effort, and perhaps even some money into mastering responsive web design. Fortunately, there are some great tools that you can use in order to bypass the whole process of having to essentially learn completely new web design principles. However, in order to create a responsive interface, you might need to focus on user centered design so that people can have a great user experience. Moreover, there are numerous tools that can be used to do this. In the same way that many web developers in this day and age use the likes of WordPress and other Content Management Systems to create what are very professional and polished websites when published, web designers whose focus is on making the sites they design responsive also have tools available to them.
Fortunately it’s a little “purer” than the example of using WordPress templates in that all you really do is use existing libraries that act as “containers” of some sort and then you simply put all your design code inside those containers and you have a responsive website.
WordPress developers on the other hand — or rather; web developers who use WordPress to create websites for their clients are perhaps not as “pure” in their approach to their craft, because that’s exactly what you’re essentially doing. You’re taking a ready-made product in the form of a template, slapping your client’s logo on it and populating it with your client’s information and then calling it a website.
That’s a discussion for another day however, otherwise to get back to the discussion of responsive web design, one such “container” into which to put all your code takes the form of Twitter’s Bootstrap. It’s pretty much just a JavaScript library which someone took the time to put together, refine and deploy as an open source project and it basically sets a great standard for responsive web design.
I’m not suggesting they used Bootstrap, but if you take a look at the likes of the Lord of the Ocean fantasy slots, this is the perfect example of how responsive web design should be done. You can tell by how the platform grows and shrinks to fill the entire width of the browser window when you expand and contract it respectively and, perhaps even more importantly, visit the same platform from any of your internet connected devices and what you have is the exact same platform which looks and operates in the exact same way for a great user experience.
