7 Common Mistakes When Designing A Responsive Website

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BY JOHN TAN

7 Common Mistakes When Designing A Responsive Website

 

Due to the change of technology and lifestyle, more people across the world are now accessing websites using mobile devices. Reports have shown that 7 out of 10 people are now using mobile devices then desktops to view websites.

And for this reason, many companies had already revamped their desktop version only websites into responsive (mobile friendly) websites.

But if we are not careful, mistakes can be made when designing a responsive website, which will affect the rendering of the mobile websites, it may even affect the indexing or ranking of your websites from major web browsers.

Here are some of the common mistakes a webmaster make when designing a responsive website.

1. Blocked JavaScript, CCS and Image Files

Google-bots (Google browser) or Bing-Bots (Yahoo browser) are web crawling bots, also known as "spider" which, crawls into websites to discover new and update content and images. The content will be indexed for users to see when they do a search in the web browser. If JavaScript, CCS and Image are blocked from bots to crawl when using robot.txt, it will directly affect the render and intended script of your website content and image. This can result in suboptimal ranking.

What you should do:

2. Unplayable Media Content

Media such as video, music and animated content which are unable to play in the mobile website will directly affect user experience when they visit your responsive website.

What you should do:

3. App Download Interstitials

Some companies like to promote their business' app using pop-ups in mobile devices. But if webmasters are not careful, it may disrupt the users' usage of the website. (i.e. pop-ups covering the main content of the website). Mobile devices screen are limited and webmaster have to consider how to place the pop-ups without affecting users from reading the main content when designing a responsive website.

What you should do:

4. Slow Mobile Pages

Fast loading website content (i.e. video, audio images) is always a priority webmasters should look at when creating a mobile friendly website. It can be frustrating if user have to wait for a long time for the webpage to be fully load. Remember, user will only stay at your website for 10 seconds before deciding to continue reading from your website or to move on to another website.

What you should do:

5. Set Viewport Correctly

Different devices comes in different sizes. Responsive website pages should set to suit the screen for all devices by using meta tag. This meta tag will then tell the browser to adjust its' screen size according to different devices.

6. Small Font Size

Font should not be set too small for user to read when using devices to view your responsive websites. Use legible font size when design your websites. A 14px font size is recommended. However, you may adjust the font size accordingly that best fits your website.

7. Touch elements too close

Buttons or links are commonly used for viewing different pages within a website. And so, webmaster need to consider the placement of the buttons which, can be easily "touch" by users.

A good guide for a button must have at least 7mm or 48px width and height and the minimum of 5mm or 32px blank spacing between 2 buttons.

Disclaimer: some of the content of this page are extracted from Google Developer.


 

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