Responsive Web Design Service

What else do you do to make a responsive website?

Simplicity and cleanliness are now at the forefront when considering design ideas for your website, as this leads to an easier, clearer and more enjoyable user-experience. When creating a responsive website we respect some universal standards, and take extra steps to ensure that your site look great, no matter what device it is viewed on.

The extra steps we take are as follows:

• Use a single column on mobiles
  With rare exceptions we use a single column on mobiles. For monitors, we use a single column for the main content, perhaps with a sidebar, but for footer elements, pages showing multiple products, and other elements as appropriate, we recommend between two and four columns.
   
• Show mobile visitors new content without scrolling
  If you have a logo, social media links, large header image, and full menu at the top of your page, then if a mobile visitor flicks through different pages of your site, they will all look idential until they scroll down. This makes it less likely that a visitor will spend a long time on your site on different pages, so we design websites to have new content as early as possible on each page.
   
• Put the word 'Menu' on any expandable menus
  
  Regular internet users will know that if you click 3 lines (called the 'Hamburger Icon'), a menu should appear, however it's easy to overlook this icon, therefore we always put the word 'Menu' next to it. We also recommend linking to the most important pages in the footer, or naturally within the text itself, e.g. for ecommerce sites adding a 'Related products' section underneath product descriptions.
   
• Be predictable
  It's great to use unusual images, engaging text, and interactive content, but it's best if the overall structure of your website is predictable, so that visitors find things where they would expect to find them.
   
• Remember that not everyone's like you
  One of our services is user-experience testing, where we typically ask 10 website visitors to view your site and give feedback on what they would do differently. We also take into account that some visitors may have poor eyesight, so use plenty of contrast between the text and background. Similarly, 8% of men are colour blind, so it's important to not have a green font on a red background, or use a similar density of green and red on an availability chart or other guide.

The initial consultation

We start with an initial consultation that includes creating a Functional Specification.  This covers things like:

• An overview of your requirements
• A wire frame (the bare bones of the design, how everything fits together)
• Definitions of different Content Types (what categories of content will be on your site and what fields they need, e.g. your site might need a ‘Venues’ page and each ‘Venue’ will need a heading, images, short description, address, phone number and map location).
• Potentially many other items, depending on your requirements (content to be migrated, permissions of different users, functionality required, etc.)

The Functional Specification ensures that we understand what you need and that everyone in the team has the same information.  The Project Manager will refine it as necessary if new requirements emerge as the site design progresses.

Indigoextra's web design service

A responsive website design is one that adapts depending on whether the visitor is using a mobile device, tablet or a monitor and that always looks beautiful, regardless of the device being used.

We will create your website to be 100% responsive, meaning that end-users will enjoy looking at your site no matter what device they’re on, and ensure all the other necessary SEO elements are in place.

At the design stage, our graphic designer will call you to chat about how you’d like the site to look and then create a creative and original design for you to review before we convert it to a finished site.  Giving your website visitors a positive first impression is essential as the longer they stay on your site, the more likely they are to use your service.  We will advise you on what looks best and ensure that the font choice, header design, overall layout, colour scheme and spacing all look great across a range of devices and are suitable for your industry and your business.

Making your site easy to edit

A CMS or Content Management System lets you login and edit your site online. Depending on your requirements, we will create your site in the Drupal, WordPress or PrestaShop CMS.

Drupal, PrestaShop and Wordpress are Open Source CMS systems which means that literally thousands of people have worked to create them and continually work to improve them – by adding new functionality, adding more visual options, improving the security, etc.  This means that we can spend our time creating a custom website for you and refining it, rather than reinventing the wheel.

We create websites that are easy to edit, use the CK Editor (pictured above), have great SEO structure built-in and are flexible (e.g. if you want a different Meta Title, Page Heading, URL and Link Title, you can easily change them, but by default they’ll all be the same, so you don’t need to think about it).

Having a beautiful and unique website is important to our clients, so we create a custom theme to give your website a unique look and show your products or services at their best.
 

Content and SEO

Google look at over 200 factors when deciding which website to put first in the search results and your customers will consider a range of factors both consciously and unconsciously when deciding whether or not to click that ‘contact’ or ‘buy’ button.

We understand how Google thinks and throughout the whole process keep your end-user in mind too.  As part of a website creation project, we will therefore optimize your site for search engines and will work with you to create some great content for your site, whether your site is in English, or for multilingual website design projects in French, German, Dutch, Italian or Spanish.

If you'd like to understand more about optimizing your website then we offer SEO training and consultation by Skype or phone - this means when you're adding content you will know what the important SEO factors are to rank well with Google.
 

Going that extra mile …

When you’re considering which web design company to choose, you may have unique requirements.  We believe in going the extra mile for our customers, so whether you’re looking for a creative way to display something (e.g. a highly specific slideshow or a photo gallery), a unique piece of functionality (e.g. a Google map linking to different locations or an original way to categorise multiple products, etc.) or something else, we pride ourselves on providing a professional and creative web design service.

If you’d like to discuss your requirements, please contact us.  Our team loves the opportunity to explore new projects and are happy to answer questions on how we can create a beautiful web design that fulfils all your needs.