We don’t need to explain how or why mobile has become so important in recent times. But the result is that everything we offer needs to be accessible by a variety of mobile devices.
Websites today deal with provisioning for mobile in several ways:
- An entirely separate mobile site, commonly done as http://m.mywebsite.com. You redirect those on mobile devices to the different sub-domain.
- Mobile applications on all common platforms i.e. android, blackberry, iphone
- A different CSS file which is specific to mobile
- A page structure and design which flexes with browser size. Responsive design.
#3 and #4 have the following benefits:
- No nasty redirects, which are a little unpredictable on which devices they redirect
- Only one page to build and maintain, which just appears differently on different devices
- Users don’t need to learn how to use two different sites
- Responsive design in particular is also semi future proof for future mobile devices
Responsive design works best on pages that have little interaction and are composed primarily of informative content. Images, navigation and text can all be set up to automatically move as the display size changes.
For our Homeowners we’re designing a single page that contains all their job and tradesmen information. It’s a page that just begs to be built with a responsive design as it’s a set of distinct, groupable content that shows boxes of content either side by side or above/below each other – depending on the width of the device you’re viewing it on.
You can see an example of responsive design at The Expressive Web
