How to build your website across multiple devices and different browsers?

Regardless to the type of device our customers use when browsing through our website, they expect to have a great browsing experience. And the responsibility to give them that is ours. An easy to use website, that’s also compatible with the different browsers available, is a mandatory field that needs to be fulfilled in order to experience your website’s full online potential.

Few years ago optimizing the website to a standard screen resolution and running them on few browsers to test their credibility, was enough to be confidently publish the site and expect all the visitors to experience a roughly similar web experience. Some of the users may notice minor issues such as greater display resolution or different fonts, etc. However, mostly the appearance of the website was constant overall, in spite of OS difference or browser difference.

But, in today’s world people are not confined to just few different browsers and even fewer OSs on their desktop or laptop computers, they are now free to access the web for anywhere through any of the mobile devices available with hundreds of different display capabilities – smart phones, tablets, of course PCs and even TVs. Also, people have become accustomed to accessing these different devices simultaneously and syncing them between each other.

So, how do we ensure that the browsing experience is uniform and best for all our website visitors? Here are few steps that you can take in order to ensure that.

Analyzing your traffic and customer interactions

It is of primary importance to immediately understand the visitors to your website. What type of device they are using? What type of content they are accessing? Etc. When, with your analysis you realize that the visitors using mobile devices to access your website averages above 10% of the total, then it is time for you to make the necessary changes to your website to make it mobile optimized. And optimizing the contents of your site to be more customers centric (i.e. contents for which visitors access your website) will grant you better traffic flow.

• Responsive Web Designing

As we have seen, to improve the user experience of visitors using mobile devices to access your website, it is important we make our websites mobile optimized. And one such way of optimizing our website is using Responsive Web Design(RWD.) RWD ensures that the contents of the existing web pages are uniformly displayed on various screen sizes and across different platforms. This is all done without having to create a separate website for mobile viewing alone. This is a much simpler option which can be used when you do not require advanced features on your web pages. RWD resizes your web pages to perfectly fit within all the different screen without the need of zooming or side scrolling.

• Dedicate Website for the Mobiles

Certain websites require more complex functionality such as user interactions, etc in such a case we recommend the development of mobile specific websites. A website with pages that are specifically designed to be used on mobile devices – higher visibility, faster load time, seamless design, easy form interactions are some of the features this option allows. Websites selling products on the web or websites with requires constant interactions with other visitors can make use of this type of mobile optimization optimally.

• Making Browser Specific Changes

Apart for optimizing the websites to be compatible for mobile device viewing, it is also necessary to optimize them to be compatible with the browsers available to the users without any issues.

There were days when you had to have all the different browsers open individually, and check for issues or incompatibility between your website updates and the browsers. When found, you had to again individually make the necessary changes to the coding based on the issue, on a complete setup. This was a time consuming process as multiple changes to multiple page layouts meant, work on them forever.

However, with the advent of newer technologies – HTML 5 and CSS 3 – and better means to make the changes, this process has become much easier. Now, coding the contents based on the browser market you want to engage or conquer will allow you to successfully optimize you web contents to be compatible with the different web browsers.

It is a known fact that with regards web technology, it is possible for the websites to work as good as it can even when something is quite not right. Which when compared with other programming environment is above notches, as even the mistake there will completely cripple it.

Hence, make sure you make necessary change whenever any issue is found on the websites, to provide your customers with the best user experience; to keep your business or service going to greater heights.