Smartphones Driving Next Evolution of Web Design

Responsive web design "is an approach to web design in which a designer intends to provide an optimal viewing experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsive_design

In the web world, things change.

And the biggest change happening right now is the explosive growth in the use of mobile devices for web browsing. The industry has seen dramatic increases in the numbers of people using their phones to access the web --including a small but increasing number who only browse the web from their phone. Over the next few years, any business that relies on their website needs to consider this new reality.

Is the website your business designed and built for a desktop environment going to work in a mobile-dominated world?

At Dorey Design, we've been discussing compatibility issues a lot lately. With the proliferation of smartphones, tablets and other viewing platforms, websites are expected to perform well across screen sizes, resolutions, browsers and operating systems that were not available a couple of years ago.

When a website that's built for one platform --let's say a conventional pc with a web browser like Firefox or Chrome --is viewed in another platform, users may find it hard to navigate, images might be the wrong size, and reading text may require lots of scrolling and pinching and zooming. Often, users will give up and go elsewhere.

To address the problem, some sites will use what's called a "media query," which means that if the user is viewing it on an iPhone (for instance), they'll get routed to a version of the site that's optimized for iPhone.

Trouble is, the site owners have to create a different site for every possible platform and screen size, which is expensive and impractical.

So web-based businesses are caught between two stubborn facts: A serious business needs to be accessible across a growing number of platforms, and those platforms are evolving so fast that rebuilding your site for each one can be impractical and expensive.

Company websites that get a lot of traffic should be sure to investigate a strategy called "responsive design."

Responsive Design is a set of design strategies that allow a website to adapt to whichever platform it's being viewed in. Responsively-designed sites are built from the ground up so that they will be adaptable, which requires a new approach to site design starting at the very beginning. Among the tools in the Responsive toolbox are scalable images, flexible grids and layouts and strategic use of media queries. The result is a site that is usable on whichever device your customers are looking at.

Let's talk about what a responsively-designed site can do to improve the reach of your small business's web presence!