With the increasing proliferation of devices able to access the internet, the fragmentation in screen sizes and the rapidly increasing volume of people accessing the web through a mobile device, the process of designing and building websites has changed fundamentally.
In 2012, the number of PCs sold declined against the previous year, Smart phone penetration was at 58 per cent and forecast to grow to 78 per cent by 2016 and despite the slowing sales of the iPad, the number of tablets sold in the UK has increased by 40 per cent in the last year alone. In order to provide a usable and functional web experience without having to build a version of a web site for each device type is why responsive design has evolved over the last few years.
Responsive web design effectively is a process that allows you to design a website once that will work across hundreds of different screen types by adapting the content to fit the device format and create a user friendly experience for your customer.
In practice, this consists of using a mix of flexible layouts, images and CSS queries that adapts the website for resolution, image size and code based on the user switching devices from a PC to a tablet or mobile phone.
This ability to automatically respond not only means that the need to redevelop for each new device on the market is eliminated but also, depending on the nature of your business, can significantly reduce the number of apps that you might produce and allow you to focus resources on those platforms that are key to the business while allowing you to provide a good user experience to all.
When thinking about a responsive website it is essential to consider the user experience – it’s not just about resizing images and screen resolutions. The key things to bear in mind are:
• Optimising images for different devices and connection speeds.
• Changing navigational position to account for how people hold a mobile device.
• Decide what can be left out, can some image be partially/fully hidden?
• Restyling links and buttons to be more touch friendly. Increasingly the devices we are turning to are touch based and consideration to how we navigate must be taken
• Ensuring elements like video or data tables resize – not just images and text need to be resized
• Dynamically resizing fonts to work better at different screen resolutions
• Get your CSS right!
The number of options now available and that will continue to come means that designing custom solutions for each new device type, or changes in technology, is already at a point where for the vast majority of businesses the effort and cost will not produce any return.
Responsive websites allow us to create sites that are future proof right now and gives us a concept and tool set to approach the ever evolving technology landscape. Alongside the cost saving of this approach it also allows us to be user centric, providing the best design on a practical level to every user.
By Farhad Koodoruth, Co-Founder of Threepipe.
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