7 Ways to Ruin a Responsive Design

The demand for a responsive design is at an all time high with Google and other places increasing focus on requiring one for mobile search. This blog will help you with the Do’s and Don’ts when in charge of a responsive design.

Top 7 Ways You Can UnderMind Your Responsive Design

Excessive amounts of high-bandwidth content on Home Page
Creating a Home Page with multiple high-resolution photos won’t be received well by users of 3G or capped data plans. It’s important to put strategically think about the features you want your homepage and navigation bar. Is 47 “featured products” necessary or is simply 10 great? Research has shown that mobile users are significantly more sensitive to load speed than the average desktop user so it pays to keep minimalist, especially on entry pages!

Ignore your product fit and audience needs
Do you have detailed product photos? Can you use less pixels but still get away with a great image, simply smaller? What makes the most sense, one, two, three product columns?How is your content structured? How will it reflow? As a general rule, items will re-flow from left / right -> top / bottom so be sure that your responsive elements still work if they’er stacked.

Don’t organize your products or categories.
If you have a lot of categories or products, consider organizing them for easier navigation. Your thumb should not get sore from endless scrolling, trying to navigate a menu!

Ignore the importance of the thumb.
Speaking of thumbs, these little guys are very important. Not only can we give a ‘thumbs up’ to friends, we use these guys insanely when we’re on our phones! While creating your beaturiful website, keep in mind that your thumb is generally bigger than the rest of your digits. Buttons, links, etc might want to be spaced far enough apart so you’re not hitting more than once and growing frustrated. Size does matter.

Ignore content pages
We all know that article pages with relevant content are great for SEO, but if you’re not coding them to be responsive they may be actively hurting your site’s rankings.

Expect pixel perfection
It’s a veryu frustrating job to be a designer. After hours, hours, and more hours designing a flawless layout, with perfect link breaks, classy font, and breathtaking photos, your sister-in-law comes over with an iPhone 7. Text break is different, images and font seem to be smaller, your nightmare is starring at you from a new fancy screen. Best two options: You can slowly drive yourself to insanity and try to maintain your pixel perfect layout or you can resign yourself to fluidity and instead focus your creative energies on writing that novel you’ve always dreamed of.

Surprise your customers
Redesign is a perfect opportunity to market your existing customers (while drawing a few more in!) Before launching your new responsice re-design, think about messaging your customers and letting them in on what’s going on and why.

Don’t hesitate to email your customers and ask them for feedback after you’ve gone live! Re-design is perfect to engage older customers, simply compose and e-mail or two and let them know!