The past year has seen significant increase in the number of people demanding for a responsive layout. This is because the user wants a consistent layout in varied screens of desktop,tab or an I- Phone.

Why is it so?

Web users expect a similar experience regardless of the device they are using. If a person visits your site and it is not optimized for their machine, there is a good chance that the user will end up leaving.

What ways we improve?

1. TYPOGRAPHY The typefaces must be kept the same style, scale and format when scaled down. You can use Plugins to sort out any issues that might occur when sizing down. One of the known plugins is FITTEXT.

2. NAVIGATION ON THE FINGER TIPS Quick navigation solutions should be kept in mind by using a pop-out or slide down menu. This is especially the case for sites that have tons of products and services, and links to various external or internal sites.

3. PROPER USE OF IMAGES The most important thing to remember is that images should not loose their clarity while compressing or re-sizing, as most of the phones use the high resolution images. The best way is to create a design first and then to display it according the various screens sizes, and see if anything gets cropped out. It might encounter some problems like re-sizing the high resolution images within different screen resolutions, to manage this we can use a service such as ADAPTIVE IMAGES. It is a very small PHP script which detects the screen size and then automatically re sizes, caches and serves a scaled-down version of the image. The software can also be customized, so you can set the quality of images and browser caching.

4. LESS TIME TO LOAD Users probably does not interact within a site taking too long to load, to make a way out of this incorporate pop-out windows, condensed menus and scroll bars. If a page has to take a little more time to load then make sure to include style or feature so the user stays engaged. Keep the images compressed so that they get visible readily.

5. AVOID SCROLLING Its important to avoid too much scrolling huge amount of content pushed into long columns makes pages very long, making it hard to obtain the desired content, to avoid this keep the content tap-able.

A responsive design is a complex one but it also increases the users availability around. Keeping a few points at our finger tips mentioned above will definitely improve understanding a responsive design :-)