You Don’t Understand How Big Mobile Really Is

If you did, your company would put other web initiatives on hold and scramble to launch the best mobile experience for your industry.

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 Site Fits All: What is Responsive Design?

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.

The keyboard and mouse are no longer the predominant input tools, and we have gone from designing for three major desktop browsers to a myriad of devices ranging from touch-based tablets and phones; smartphones with tiny keyboards; video game controllers and television remotes. In the near future, high-resolution tablets and computer displays will be on the market, and this change will require that pixel-based web design be completely rethought.

Over the past two years, our clients have requested sites built for specific devices—a “main” site for desktops, a “mobile” version with a specific design intended for smartphones, and more recently an “iPad” version—which is really a simplified version of their desktop site. As you can imagine, this strategy introduces a lot of management complexity and cost into the web design and content management process.

Fortunately, there is is a solution. The recent adoption of HTML5 and CSS3 by browser makers, in addition to some JavaScript-based fallback methods, have introduced the holy grail of inter-device design compatibility: responsive design.

Responsive Design: One Site Fits All (Devices)

Simply put, responsive design is a flexible, device-independent technique that allows a single site layout to automatically “shift and adapt” to any size of browser window on any device, at any screen resolution.

In other words, your site’s design layout will readjust to best fit the screen on which it is being viewed. This is accomplished by shifting the location of navigation and content on the page, adding or removing content, and increasing or decreasing image and font sizes so the site automatically provides the best layout for any screen.

Responsive design isn’t a single technology; it represents a radically different strategic design approach and development workflow. We believe it to be so beneficial that we are often recommending that many of our clients consider responsive design for their content-managed sites.

These are some of the benefits that responsive design offers:

• Adapts your site to a specific range of devices without needing to create a separate device-specific site, or without having to change your content.
• Works in every browser, with native support from IE 9 (which is now being actively pushed to users by Microsoft), Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and via JavaScript-based fallback support for IE 6, 7 and 8.
• Is a process that is compatible with content management systems.
• It is significantly less expensive to maintain and deploy than developing and maintaining separate device-specific versions of your site (even if it does initially require more planning and work than a simple desktop site).

Now that you know what responsive design is, it’s time to learn how to drive implementation within your organization. After the holidays, I’ll discuss drawbacks, introduce you to the responsive design workflow and introduce a strategy for integrating responsive design into your existing sites.

This post will be updated with links to the subsequent articles.

A Picture Tells a Million Words

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.

TeuxDeux for To Do’s

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?“

Live from DrupalCon Chicago 2011

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.

Are we done with IE6 yet?

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.”