Hello this is Mikel with TinyFrog Technologies. I want to talk a little bit about responsive design. Actually, the title of this video blog is “beyond responsive”.
Pretty much every website nowadays is responsive, meaning the website is responding to the device that it’s being viewed on and so for example, if you have a mobile device and you adjust the, turn it from a horizontal to a vertical view, the the screen and the content in the screen will adjust to fit the screen. That’s what’s called “mobile responsive design.” It’s been in existence for close to a dozen years or so, so pretty much every website is or should be mobile responsive. But it doesn’t mean the website’s going to be optimized for mobile.
I’m sure you’ve had this experience where you’re scrolling through a website on your mobile device or a tablet a smaller screen device and things just don’t line up properly or things just don’t look right, and typically there’s like spacing issues or alignment issues. And what’s typically happening there is the website is adjusting for smaller screen sizes, and every time it adjusts from one screen size to another, it’s called a break point.
Like let’s say you have a larger tablet to a smaller tablet or if you turn the tablet from horizontal to vertical, to a different size phone. So there’s multiple different break points, and if your designer is not considering those break points when they’re designing the website, that’s typically where the design – where the website wasn’t optimized or designed properly for a mobile or smaller device viewing.
We actually build into our process an approach called “mobile wise design.” Essentially what that means is whenever we’re designing a website, our designers are considering how the website will be seen on all the different screen sizes. And if that’s done effectively, you’re factoring in the different spacing and the different margins and different buffers around the different design elements, that’s when the website can be optimized for mobile.
Another thing that’s really important to make sure that is built into a website development and design project is quality control. Every website should be thoroughly tested for different browsers and different devices, and there’s software that can help facilitate that nowadays. In fact, that’s what we use to help facilitate really in-depth testing to make sure that the website – every website that we build is optimized for all different screen sizes.
So there’s a lot more than just having a responsive website. It goes beyond that to building and designing and quality control testing a website to be optimized for mobile.
