Is having a website that works perfectly on the desktop sufficient for your business? Every web development company in California will press on the fact that it is a must for the website to perform seamlessly across every device and platform. Be it mobile, laptops, iPads, or Nintendo, the digital real estate for websites is more varied now than ever before. Optimizing for each platform might be a daunting task, but what if we told you, you don’t need to!
Instead, you can cut all the clutter and make the website seamless across all devices by opting for responsive web development services. With this, your content shifts itself as per every device, ensuring a smooth user experience. Well, it isn’t that easy either. When you opt for responsive web development, there will be specific challenges that will crop up.
We will explore the various challenges and their probable solutions to foster responsive web development in this article.
Challenges in Responsive Web Development and Solutions
Navigation Management
A navigation menu is helpful as it works like a map for folks on the website. Your partner web development company in California will mention the need to strengthen the navigation. If users can reach different pages easily, it shows the website navigation is genuinely robust. When working on responsive web development, the responsive navigation should scale directly in proportion to the relevant screen size without any discrete structure. You will end up confusing website visitors if there’s a different navigation structure for every device. It will end up increasing the bounce rates for the website.
Solution
The primary aim for your team of web developer in Los Angeles is to make the navigation menu self-explanatory and intuitive for small-screen devices. A good navigation decision can come after analyzing the information architecture and website data. Also, doing multiple rounds of responsive testing online on various devices will help you get better results and enhance the site’s accessibility.
Mobile vs. Desktop
This is a major concern for every web developer in Los Angeles as clients come back complaining about it. The website built for the desktop will always fail to deliver a smooth experience on mobile. For instance, a website built with a padding of 200 px looks apt on the desktop. However, when the same site opens on mobile, the site looks disoriented! This is a major concern, and hence, every web development company in California should consider the mobile view while doing responsive web development.
Solution
For a problem such as this, responsive web development is the way to go. A simple suggestion would be to use percentages instead of pixels. With the percentage option, the content fits according to the screen size. So whenever the screen size shrinks, the content is automatically adjusted in the best way possible to offer an unhindered viewing experience.
Slow Loading Time
The world is now aware of the importance of a fast-loading website. What happens the moment a site loads slowly? You jump out of it to another site that offers similar services! So, that’s the thing. Even a second delay in loading can lead you to losses with website visitors trailing off!
Many times, the page loading speed decreases considerably in responsive web development. This is mainly because the website has to handle traffic from both mobile and desktop. For this reason, the pages are heavy, and it might work slowly.
Solution
Your partner web development company in California might suggest conditional loading to counter this issue. In conditional loading, only some aspects of a web page are loaded which are needed by the user. Instead of adding heavy text, images, and videos, the solution is to offer users what they want to see. Taking them directly to their search intent makes it easier for the end user to make quick decisions. Also, there are more mobile users than ever before, and the number is only increasing. To enhance the loading speed of your responsive website, we highly recommend utilizing conditional loading.
Browser Compatibility
When opting for responsive web development, ask your partner web design agency in California to ensure the site works uniformly across platforms. The functionality and the behavior of the site should change when viewed on different browsers.
The use of CSS3 Media Queries in responsive web designs allows the rendering of the content according to different screen sizes as per screen layout. With an appropriately crafted set of media queries, the site can display different layouts across multiple devices.
Browsers such as- IE 8 or Internet Explorer 8 do not support media queries. Check browser support with proper browser compatibility testing!
Solution
During the process of responsive web development, use JavaScript. It enables changing the page layout as per the browser window. You can use Polyfill to maintain the initial layout of the site. With this, the developers can use technology that a browser primarily and natively supports. Also, ask your partner web development company in California to use a conditional IE stylesheet with proper elementary styling.
Data on Small Screen Size
There’s a massive amount of data displayed in tables. These tables have an unending number of rows and columns. It becomes challenging to showcase all of it on a small screen and be responsive simultaneously. The tables need to keep changing with the changing dimensions of the screen. Further, it is even more challenging to deal with tales that are further complex, elaborate, and crowded in nature.
Solution
Responsive tables are the best way to handle such data display issues for small screens. Instead of relying on the grid layout for responsive web design, it may be beneficial to consider creating a compact table that doesn’t require horizontal scrolling. Offering a condensed version or preview of the table can give users a glimpse of the information and a link to access the full version.
Touch Concern
The whole idea of responsive web development is to offer an optimal experience to mobile device users. However, there can be issues of abusing touch from developers in this quest. The scroll experience can also be flimsy, hence hampering the entire user experience on the site.
Solution
Ensure all the navigational buttons are big enough for users to move through the website quickly. To foster an excellent scrolling experience, you can ask your partner web development company in California to add a smooth scroll feature.
Conclusion
As mobile device users keeps growing, the focus for every business should move towards responsive web development. It will ensure that you get all the major sections of the audience, and it helps make your brand credible as well! Just like any good thing, this will have its share of challenges, which are discussed with probable solutions in the above sections! Discuss this with your partner web development company in California and kick off the proceedings!
Hi! I’m Jessica Bennett, a full-time technical writer at Unified Infotech. My expertise is in taking in a lot of information and communicating the key ideas. I’m skilled at simplifying difficult technical phrases and jargon such that the common audience can grasp it. I assist major technical organizations in effectively communicating their message across multiple platforms. I hold both a master’s degree in Computer Applications and a bachelor’s degree in English literature. I can write about a wide range of topics for different audiences because of my varied background.