Responsive web design

Is your website responsively designed?

Of course you’ve got a great website, and when users view it on their desktop PC or Mac they love it! But how does it work on other, smaller devices: tablets, notebooks, smartphones ...?

The number of people using iPads and iPhones to browse the internet grows daily. And while mobile web browsing is nothing new, many businesses have yet to make the move from the desktop to ensure their websites are easy to view across the spectrum of devices.

The word on the web-design community is that designing for smaller, handheld computers is a bit of a puzzle, falling between the feast of opportunities presented by designing for a desktop PC and the challenge of shrinking to fit when aiming for the mobile market. But it doesn’t have to be that difficult if your design team is up to speed, meaning that:

• a brand new website is successful across the whole spectrum of devices and browsers
• an existing, traditional desktop-designed website can quickly become mobile- or tablet-friendly.

As with most things, there are always other options. For example:

• you might decide to deliver different pages of your websites on mobile phones, so will need to consider whether tablets should get the desktop version or the phone version. 

Decisions, decisions …

The first option – a brand new website – is pretty much a no-brainer: these days, when designing from scratch, the web designer will know the markets the end product has to reach and can go ahead in full knowledge of the customer’s expectations.

The complexity of the second option – revising what you’ve already got – will depend on how your existing website was designed, but in most instances implementation involves relatively simple tweaks.

The third option – well, that’s your prerogative, and certainly achievable whichever way you jump, though there are specific, and perhaps less obvious, considerations for this type of application.  

In all instances, careful development and testing will ensure your website works successfully across the range of browsers, from Internet Explorer and Chrome, through Firefox and Safari to Opera … and any others you care to mention.

As a basic start point, there are a few simple tricks to consider, such as:

Clickable to touchable: what you click on a desktop PC or Mac needs to be big enough to be a touch target on a tablet or smartphone.

Font sizes: as tablets have smaller screens than typical desktop and notebook computers, if a website is designed to a fixed width, it will be shrunk down on a smaller device; it is essential that the text is not too small to read, and that the touch targets are big enough on such gadgets as the iPad mini.

There are lots more, of course. And that is where Apple Print and Creative comes in. Our web design team and web builders have the latest technological advances well under control; their combined experience means they know just about every trick in the book and are magic at designing new websites and tweaking existing ones. They work hand-in-hand with clients to ensure they fully understand the image a company wishes to portray. Any proposal for the design and development of a website – whether adding to or updating an existing site or building one from scratch – will ensure that the end result meets the needs of a client and, in turn, their customers. And our ‘webbers’ won’t be absent friends: they involve the client throughout the process of design and development, giving the opportunity to fine-tune along the way to be certain that the end product fits the bill exactly.

Why not have a chat with us about how you could be presenting your media face to the world?