Making your portal mobile responsive

Making your Power Pages portal mobile-responsive is crucial for ensuring that users can access and interact with your portal smoothly on any device. This involves designing the site layout and components to adjust dynamically based on screen size. Below, I’ll explain how you can optimize your Power Pages site for mobile responsiveness, step by step.

1. Understanding Mobile Responsiveness in Power Pages

Mobile responsiveness ensures that:

The layout and design of your portal adjust to fit smaller screens.
Elements like text, buttons, forms, and images scale appropriately.
Navigation remains user-friendly on mobile devices.

Power Pages inherently supports responsive design to an extent, but you will need to customize certain aspects for an optimal user experience across various devices, especially for smartphones and tablets.

2. Using the Bootstrap Grid System

Bootstrap’s grid system plays a key role in making your site responsive. It divides the page into 12 equal-width columns, allowing you to control how content behaves on different screen sizes.

Step 1: Incorporate Bootstrap’s Grid System

Bootstrap allows you to create responsive layouts by defining how many columns each element should span at different breakpoints (screen widths).

Here’s an example of using Bootstrap’s grid system:

<div class="container">
  <div class="row">
    <div class="col-lg-6 col-md-12 col-sm-12">Column 1</div>
    <div class="col-lg-6 col-md-12 col-sm-12">Column 2</div>
  </div>
</div>

col-lg-6: For large screens (e.g., desktops), each column will take up half of the width (6 out of 12 columns).
col-md-12: For medium screens (e.g., tablets), each column will take up the full width (12 out of 12 columns).
col-sm-12: For small screens (e.g., smartphones), each column will take up the full width (12 out of 12 columns).

By adjusting these classes, you can make your layout more adaptable to different screen sizes.

3. Mobile-Friendly Navigation

A mobile-friendly navigation bar is essential for user experience on smaller screens. Bootstrap provides built-in responsive navigation components, including the collapsible navbar that transforms into a hamburger menu on smaller screens.

Step 2: Implement a Responsive Navbar

Here’s an example of a responsive Bootstrap navbar:

<nav class="navbar navbar-expand-lg navbar-light bg-light">
  <a class="navbar-brand" href="#">Brand</a>
  <button class="navbar-toggler" type="button" data-toggle="collapse" data-target="#navbarNav" aria-controls="navbarNav" aria-expanded="false" aria-label="Toggle navigation">
    <span class="navbar-toggler-icon"></span>
  </button>
  <div class="collapse navbar-collapse" id="navbarNav">
    <ul class="navbar-nav">
      <li class="nav-item active">
        <a class="nav-link" href="#">Home</a>
      </li>
      <li class="nav-item">
        <a class="nav-link" href="#">Features</a>
      </li>
      <li class="nav-item">
        <a class="nav-link" href="#">Pricing</a>
      </li>
    </ul>
  </div>
</nav>

In the example above:

The navbar-expand-lg class ensures that the navbar expands on large screens and collapses into a hamburger menu on smaller screens.
navbar-toggler creates the button for the hamburger menu.

This ensures that the navigation remains clean and accessible on any device.

4. Using Viewport Meta Tag

The viewport meta tag is a key part of mobile responsiveness. It controls the layout on mobile browsers and makes sure the page scales correctly on devices with different screen sizes.

Step 3: Add the Viewport Meta Tag to the Header

Go to Portal Management → Web Templates → Header.
Add the following meta tag to ensure that the page adapts properly to mobile devices:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">

This tells the browser to scale the page’s content based on the device’s width, ensuring that the layout fits properly on mobile screens.

5. Optimizing Images for Mobile

Images can be one of the most significant factors affecting your site’s performance on mobile devices. Large or unoptimized images can cause slow loading times, making for a poor user experience.

Step 4: Use Responsive Image Techniques

You can make images responsive by using the img-fluid class provided by Bootstrap, which automatically adjusts the width of images to fit the container.

<img src="image.jpg" class="img-fluid" alt="Responsive Image">

This class ensures that the image maintains its aspect ratio and scales down or up according to the screen size.

Additionally, consider using srcset and sizes attributes for different image resolutions. This allows the browser to load smaller images for mobile devices and larger images for desktop displays, improving performance.

Example:

<img srcset="image-320w.jpg 320w, image-640w.jpg 640w, image-1280w.jpg 1280w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 320px, (max-width: 1200px) 640px, 1280px" src="image-640w.jpg" alt="Optimized Image">

6. Handling Text Responsively

On mobile devices, text can become difficult to read if not properly scaled. You can use relative units like em or rem instead of fixed units like px for font sizes, ensuring text scales appropriately on different screens.

Step 5: Use Media Queries for Custom Font Sizes

Media queries allow you to apply specific styles depending on the screen size. You can use them to adjust font sizes and layout for different devices.