Website traffic is the key component to building any strong community. As web designers, we often forget about the user experience and focus on pretty graphics and pixel icons. However, without users, our websites would turn into bits of redundant data held on servers across the world.
When building a credible website, you must garner each user’s trust and reliability. When undergoing the design process, spend some time considering which slices in your layout will be accessed the most. How will users jump from page to page, and how difficult is processing information? If you can indulge a satisfactory answer to these questions, you’re on a great path for building responsive websites.
I’ve added a few ideologies below that should get you thinking about website credibility. User Interface design is an entire topic and has grown to enormous proportions in recent years. Although trends have been changing, the end result is always quick access with no-nonsense web browsing.
Gain Your Visitors’ Trust
This should be a no-brainer for any conscious web designer. When you visit a website and are presented with two popups and ad space everywhere, you probably aren’t going to input your credit card number anywhere. There are small ticks that give off the impression of a distrustful website, and blatant advertisements are a big one.
This isn’t to imply that advertising is of no importance. In fact, it’s the main cash cow for all Internet enthusiasts and webmasters alike. But there is a balance between usability and revenue sharing. On a similar token, your visitors will not feel very trusting if you block their path throughout pages.
Examples include websites with jQuery lightboxes and hover effects over drop-down menus that hide page context. Most visitors will not care to sign up for your newsletter whenever they see your popup. A small registration box in the sidebar is enough to capitalize on your target audience while demonstrating trust.
Browser Incompatibilities
It’s not uncommon for websites to behave differently in the many browsers available. Ten years ago, it was almost impossible for a standards-compliant website to fit the same build on every browser, and this goes double for Internet Explorer.
In today’s modern web, we have seen tremendous growth and maturity in browsers. It seems Google Chrome and Firefox have been leading the way, with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 finally succumbing to the bandwagon effect. There are still many bugs to be fixed in browsing software, so it’s important to gauge your analytics data and apply bug fixes accordingly. You may be pleasantly surprised with how much traffic actually uses more modern-day browsers such as Firefox or Opera.
As browsers become more unpredictable, rendering HTML pages becomes difficult, and additional JavaScript effects can produce heavy webpage distortion. With jQuery’s deep library and community advancement, we are seeing growth in this arena like never before. If you know professional web developers in the field, consult their opinions before constructing your design’s frontend system.
Fragmentation of Page Content
Most of the web traffic today is brought through Google searches. Google is our wisdom keeper and controls all the information we could ever imagine. For this reason, it’s very important to keep related information on the same page throughout your websites.
Visitors will be expected to jump around and search page content for what they’re looking for. The current generation of Internet users is much less patient in waiting for results. Possibly, the most important aspect of a responsive website is to provide anthropological reasoning into your content hierarchy. Look at your website as a human-constructed tool instead of a technological invention.
Consider your links and paragraphs as the main information streams. Visitors won’t always read everything in-page and tend to skip around for keywords. This is important to recognize as once you can grasp the content layout, it’s easy to build future websites, both client and personal works.
Link hover states also affect your visitor’s psyche. This plays a significant role in page fragmentation as visitors are looking for quick responses to hover states. Make sure your hyperlinks stand out from the rest of your page content. This makes scanning content a breeze and saves loads of time on the backs of your visitors.
Relative Flexibility with Media
In-page text isn’t the only way to transmit information. With the constant growth in our Web 2.0 era, videos and imagery are seen as quicker mediums for understanding concepts. YouTube has exploded since its launch in early 2005. This is not by accident and goes to show just how powerful video content can be.
However, a responsive website should be able to handle any form of traffic. This even includes mobile visitors from iOS and Android-powered devices, let alone the many tablets on the market today. CSS3 media queries are powerful tools for manipulating your site layout based on the browsing engine.
If you’d like to remove images for all mobile browsers, you can do this with just a few bits of code. You even have the option of switching between CSS3 or jQuery techniques. In previous articles, we’ve outlined possible code examples and many more ideas.
Conclusion
It’s tempting to build up a unique and brilliant layout full of vector art. As designers and illustrators, we strive for the highest level of completion with our artistic talents. However, inflicting these types of designs on every project is not always plausible.
Responsive website design aims to quickly offer solutions to whatever a user may need. The response time should be faster than lightspeed while guiding your visitors through pages and sub-pages. The ultimate goal is perfect user experience within a broad range of website browsers.
The many challenges facing UX experts today come with perfecting interfaces inside websites. If you’re looking for tips on user-sensitive layouts, we’ve written on many techniques. Complexity increases with each launch, and keeping yourself objective in all project works is important. If you have similar ideas for responsive designs, please offer them in the discussions below.
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