Responsive Web Design has caught the imagination of developers around the world. It is quite comprehensible that responsive web design has many functional benefits for online retailers as well as e-shop owners. Many Magento certified developers, as well as business owners are completely in for a single as well as flexible overall responsive design along with a code base that adapts instantly to the device type.
Despite latest advanced in the technology leading to Responsive Design Server Side Components (RESS), Responsive Web Design (RWD) is still the best bet for forward-thinking online retailers who want to take care of the growing mobile market. Having said this, making an eCommerce website responsive is much more a complex process than making a blog or a static web page responsive.
Nevertheless, Responsive Web Design fits the bill for many online retailers. The advantages are many, for example, nearly 56% of American adults now own a smartphone and more and more are now adopting to the tablet. In fact, the latter figure has doubled in the past year. At the same time, the challenges remain. Let’s examine some of the top challenges that Responsive Web Design developers have to deal with.
Deciding your website strategy
Today’s eCommerce websites are still being designed for the desktop. More often than not, eCommerce websites consist of several dozen elements, out of which the main elements have to fit into a hand held screen or a tablet. Many a times, these elements need repositioning and consequently, you need to rethink your strategy for this market segment. Read more on responsive web design vs. the mobile website.
Hence, amongst all things, you need to decide what the primary purpose of the website is and decide which content is essential to support this decision. For example, your website may exist only to provide information rather than making sales, so you need to include only the content that supports this ideal.
Also, you need to make sure that you don’t remove or add elements because the size of your device gets bigger or smaller. Essentially, you need to know your content and strategize your next move. Further, also figure out what the most important parts of your website are. For example, your analytic software will help you determine which pages as well as parts users have been interacting with the most. Furthermore, its essential that you test your design thoroughly before you launch it.
Adapting Responsive Web Design to different page views
The next challenge that you could face is that depending upon the situation, there could be many views of a single page. The page that is being currently displayed could be different for a wholesale buyer than for a routine visitor interested in a retail purchase. Therefore, this multiplicity of scenarios means that designing as well as building an eCommerce website is a more complex task than creating a simple static website.
The right way to approach this issue is to design for the most complex situation and scale down to a lesser complex situation that you could face in reality. Now, you can start removing the elements as the situation becomes less and less complex.
The Use of Tables
The next challenge that Responsive Web Design could throw up is tables, which sometimes show up in several cases of eCommerce design. However, they are hard to use in Responsive Web Design. The fact is that certain elements in eCommerce websites such as shopping carts as well as product comparisons require tables, but translating these elements to Responsive Web Design need a workaround as tables can get very messy in this case.
Comfortability of the final design
The next challenge that you could face is creating a website that is comfortable to use on an overall basis. Also, the links that you access should have room to breath and your touch target should be large enough for your fingers to click on the links easily, thereby eliminating the use of a mouse completely. Also, using placeholder text instead of going with a traditional label is a sure way to save space and make up for someone who abandons the input field by reappearing as it is possible that the user will forget what the input field was asking for.
Hence, Responsive Web Design is still going strong despite its new avatar RESS, and care should be taken while handling Responsive Web Design for websites that need to be designed for the modern gadgets of today including hand held, smart phones, tablets, and other devices.
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Shivi Rao is a content marketer with Krish. She has worked in various industries spanning technology, science, rural marketing, startups & unicorns, eCommerce business, and digital marketing, believing that content is the foundation to facilitate the visibility of any organization and ensuring her words do the same. In her free time, you can either find her lifting weights in the gym or feeding the strays.
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