As you’re surfing the Internet you see a fantastic article about how to make the perfect cat video. You also want to save some photos from Google Image Search and store them somewhere you can access on the go. What about recipes? Do you have a recipe box gathering dust because you search the Internet now for recipes? Where do you keep all this stuff so you can easily reference it later?
For an introduction to responsive design, see Part One in this series.
In our first article, we discussed the amazing flexibility that responsive design offers. But this flexibility comes with a price that might negatively affect your fastest-growing audiences – mobile and tablet users. While offering a flexible layout, responsive design requires the latest browsers, more code, and large images. In short, responsive layouts can be bandwidth hogs and resource-intensive to render. This affects users on the move, where bandwidth is the scarcest, and where processors lack the raw power of their desktop predecessors.
With mobile smartphone use growing at such an astounding pace, I’m constantly amazed that there are still so many top-tier companies that do not have a dedicated mobile website experience. I believe that this rapid growth seems to be outpacing many IT and marketing executives’ ability to digest and grasp how mobile is going to drastically affect their business growth – particularly in the consumer space.
With mobile, the year 2012 will be a unique parallel to 1996-97, when many industry titans were caught with their pants down by the speed at which web use grew, and were unable to launch a compelling website faster than their competitors.
One of the most important factors in evaluating a website design is answering the question, “What is the average screen size my visitors will use to view my site?” Over the past few years, this evaluation process has become both more complex and more confusing due to the explosion of Internet-connected devices. Website access has shifted dramatically, and mobile/tablet browsing is expected to surpass desktop usage over the next two years.
How Much is a Dynamic Picture Worth?
The old saying goes “a picture tells a thousand words” — but today that saying may actually be an understatement. Consuming information through images, rather than the written word, has become increasingly popular. With the rise of the Internet, our demand for visual information has increased exponentially, but static pictures in a world filled with dynamic, real-time information are falling behind fast. Further, the latest technologies for browsing from desktops to mobile and even entertainment devices have ushered in a dramatic leap forward in digital interactivity.
I’m horrible at sticking with an online to-do list. I’ve tried quite a few; Remember the Milk, the Gmail to-do list and numerous others. It seems that within a week or two, I forget that it exists and go back to chicken scratches on Post-It notes when I remember to do so. Enter TeuxDeux. Tagline, “What deux yeux have teux deux teuxday?“
Well, not exactly live! DrupalCon 2011 has finally come to a close today—and I was too busy enjoying the keynotes, sessions and after-hours parties to update our blog about the happenings at this year’s event.
The conference was a great opportunity to see how the Drupal community has matured, how it continues to evolve as social media and mobile change and how we think about delivering content online. Dries Buytaert—the original creator and project lead for Drupal—kicked off the conference by discussing the future of Drupal and how the next version, Drupal 8, will be mark-up free so that it can serve data via XML or JSON as easily as it does HTML. This approach underscores the vision that content management systems must focus on delivering information to any device and any environment at any time.
PCWorld’s Tony Bradley called Internet Explorer 6 “the archaic and insecure browser that refuses to die.” I think Tony was being nice.
Throughout what feels like an eternity (since April 27, 2001), IE6 has meant “NO, that design won’t work in IE6; that transparency won’t work with IE6; that will look great, except in IE6.”
