AS WE'RE all very aware, when people look at your website they could be doing so from their laptop, desktop, mobile, tablet device or even their widescreen TV.
A successful website is no longer about having a fixed-width layout that looks best on a desktop or high-resolution laptop; it’s about offering a responsive website that looks its absolute best on whatever device your customer chooses.
In the summer of last year, Ethan Marcotte (a Boston-based and world-renowned designer, speaker and author) coined the phrase “responsive web design” in his seminal article published on A List Apart, explaining a new, forward-thinking approach to designing and building websites.
By combining three core elements that are already standard tools for web design and development – a flexible grid-based layout, flexible images and media, and CSS3 Media Queries – websites can now respond (or adapt) to the resolution of whatever screen is used to view them.
This is the way forward for creating the best experience possible for your organisation’s users and customers. This is how you should be asking your agency to design and build your website, and it is how designers, studios, or agencies should now be creating websites by default.
To give you an example, take a look at http://naomiatkinsondesign.com on your laptop or desktop, then view it on your mobile. You don’t see a tiny version of what you’ve viewed on a larger screen, something you have to zoom into or struggle to read: you see a custom layout for that size of screen. Some content may have been hidden (in this instance, any decorative content that simply isn’t required at small screen sizes).
Font sizes have been adjusted, images have been automatically scaled, certain functionality optimised based on context (the contact form uses the mobile device’s default style on drop-down menus, rather than the custom behaviour on desktop browsers). All of this is done in a very simple way which is extremely cost- effective.
We’ve reached a point in the evolution of the web where there is an extremely small use-case for separate device-specific versions of a website. A unique mobile version of your website requires more time to design and build – sometimes a lot more – which leads to increased costs for creation and maintenance, as well as adding another place for you to publish or maintain your content.
The device market is growing by the day. Make sure that your site is future-proof: make sure it is responsive.
:: Naomi Atkinson is owner of Naomi Atkinson Design in Newcastle