We have analyzed many blog posts, forums, users’ comments to get this list of 5 most frequently asked questions about responsive design. This is one of the most talked about trends in website design this year, and if you still don’t know enough about it, this post will throw the light on every aspect of this innovative design technique.

Many of you, if not all, have at least one of popular gadgets, am I right? Gone are the days when we used our cell phones just to make calls. Today, we use our smartphones to chat with friends on Facebook, post pictures on Instagram, check our email and even do shopping. Tablets go even more with functionality: we definitely can use them to watch movies and do business online.

This entire introduction was to drive at the importance of responsive website design. For the beginning, you need to know that responsive website design (RWD) means the ability of a website to fit to any screen resolution and mobile device. If a user opens a website on a desktop, he sees everything in a big size; smaller resolution don’t cut the page, but reduce it to a needed size.

When someone claims that responsive design is good, he needs to prove it. Otherwise, users won’t believe and adopt this feature for their business. The well-reasoned statement is more likely to win users’ approval. So finally, we will give you these 5 popular questions on the topic and of course, answers to them.

Question No. 1: Why Do I Need Responsive Website Design?

The first reason why responsive design is important is caused by the high mobile Internet usage. Besides it, responsive design solves many problems of online businesses and help website owners to gain better resultswith almost anything:

• RWD saves time and money. It is easier, quicker and more money-saving to maintain one website instead of having two of them: one for desktop and another for mobile users.
• RWD is more accessible than a regular desktop website. A desktop website can be launched just via computer, which means you need to be at home/in the office or have your laptop with you anywhere you are. Responsive website can be reached from just any place – you need to have your smart device with you.
• RWD is good for SEO. You will have the only SEO campaign for your online business with RWD, because you will have the only URL. Therefore, you don’t have to promote and optimize two websites.
• RWD gets you more customers and increase conversion rates. When users open a non-responsive website on the smartphone, they usually get out of there right away. This doesn’t happen with responsive site, which is suitable for desktops as well as for mobile devices. Users like simplicity, accessibility, and usability, so RWD (which offers easy find and quick purchase) guarantees you higher conversion rates.
• RWD helps you to stay competitive. Any business, be it merchant service, photography, fashion, or medicine, is very fierce in terms of competition. There are always people behind your back but there are also those who go ahead of you. If you have responsive website, you can compete with the giants of your business, and leave behind those who haven’t realize the importance of this technique yet.

Question No. 2: Is Responsive Design Perfect? What Are Drawbacks?

Yes, you are right: responsive design is not perfect. There are both advantages and disadvantages of using it. The major benefits were described above, and now it is turn to reveal its bad side.

• Slow loading time. Responsive website needs more time to load, because full-size images are downloaded and then resized to fit the device screen resolution.
• Call to Action. Call to action button will resize as well as all other design elements and it becomes really uncomfortable to click on a small button via a touchscreen.
• Images. Imagery is one of the biggest cons of responsive website design. The problem is that you probably won’t choose the same images for 24” desktop and a 4” smartphone screen. You can use a long shot on a desktop site, while it is better to pick a close-up image for a small screen size.

Question No. 3: How To Avoid Mistakes and Risks with Responsive Design?

As for the loading speed, you can optimize images by compressing and scaling them down. There are many free and accessible tools for it. Also, you can get rid of unnecessary content items and so speed up your site.

The buttons need to be big enough to tap (take finger size into consideration). A good size is something approximately 44x44px. It is a very easy solution to make CTA work on responsive site.

Navigation menu can become a big problem for RWD. But if you manage to create a suitable menu for all screen resolutions, this is not a thing to worry about. How about scrolling? It would work pretty well for both desktop and mobile designs.

Question No.4: What is Better? Responsive vs. Adaptive vs. Mobile Website

At first, let’s give definition to each of these terms:

Responsive website design uses one URL for all devices, it shows the same content on these devices but the views are different.

Adaptive website design uses also one URL, but has different content arrangement for devices, because there are a few design versions. The major role here goes to the server, which loads a needed version depending on the screen resolution.

Mobile website design is a whole new website that has its own URL. Such website is created just for mobile devices.

What does make these designs different from each other and which one is better for users?

• One URL is more convenient for users, and from this point of view mobile website is not good enough.
• Mobile website has the best loading speed, and this is very important. Adaptive website is a bit slower, yet faster than responsive.
• The easiest and time-saving maintenance is for responsive website. Mobile website will cost you twice more!

To wrap up, we need to admit that responsive design is a bit more convenient, user-friendly and easy in maintenancecompared with its opponents. Sure thing, it has some disadvantages, but advantages are very persuasive.

Question No. 5: How to Test My Responsive Website?

Many designers and developers really worry about the testing issue, because responsive site must be perfect and good-looking on any device, even if you don’t know about a gadget existence yet. There are many good tools for you to check your responsive website before launch. Here we are giving you some:

1. Responsinator. This tool takes your URL and then tries a website on many devices, like different iPhone models, Android, iPad, and Kindle. It is cool that images are put one by one vertically, so you see just one image before scrolling. The images are not confused and you won’t miss any detail.
2. Responsive Design Is. This tool works similar to the previous one, but offers you a bit lesser choice of screen resolutions: just four. All images are above the fold, and their characteristics are lower in the text.
3. Browser Stach Responsive. This tool is convenient to use because you can pick the device to test on yourself. Plus, there are ‘portrait’ and ‘landscape’ options that you can set manually, too.
4. DesignModo Responsive Test. Here you get the biggest choice of devices to pick and what is more you can set the screen resolution manually, and it can be anything you want.
5. Responsive Design Checker. While using this tool, you have a choice of various screen resolutions, which are divided into 2 groups: desktops&laptops and tablets&phones.

Conclusion

Many questions precede the decision on creating a responsive website design. Here, in this article, we gathered facts about RWD that you need to know, and gave you a good portion of information to avoid long searches and time-wasting articles.