Posted On September 18th, 2011 Author Kyle Racki
Filed Under Design, Business, Development, 1
Just recently, a big change came along in web design; Arguably the biggest revolution since modern web standards in the early 2000's.
Responsive Design has been invented. It's a term used in new age architecture to describe buildings that behave 'responsively'. That is, they adapt or respond to conditions such as the amount of people in a given room, for instance. They will automatically change heat, air and even room size (yes, the walls expand and contract!) to accommodate more or less people.
And just like Responsive Design in architecture, when it comes to the web, responsive design allows websites to no longer behave like static online brochures that scroll, but rather they adapt by expanding and contracting, resizing themselves to appropriately fit a variety of screen sizes. So for example, a website might have five columns when viewed on a 52" wide screen, but when viewed on a laptop it may scale down to three columns, two on an iPad and down to one column when viewed on a smart phone.
The best way to illustrate this is by viewing this gallery of well-designed responsive sites. You'll see four views for each site, from wide screen down to a small screen. Pretty impressive, huh?
The best part is, designing sites to be responsive does not add a lot of size, scope or complexity to a project. Sure, it adds some work for the designer and developer. But really in the grand scheme of building a website from start to finish, building it responsively is not all that time consuming once you know how.
Now, like all things in life, there's a catch. Building a website with responsive design is not a replacement for a mobile app or site. There are subtle but key differences.
Depending on your business, you may find that you actually need a mobile web application instead of just a website that scales to a variety of devices and screen sizes. The reasons are:
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Functionality
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Weight
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Business Model
1) Functionality
The trick with responsive is that it's all in the layout. When a user is on a smart phone, they are looking at the exact same site as on a desktop computer, but the CSS or style sheet is scaling the site visually to look better on a mobile device. It's kind of like window dressing. The HTML page is exactly the same.
Now you may find that on a mobile device, you want to do more than simply make the website look different. You actually want to take advantage of a mobile device' hardware. You may want to let the user shake their phone to randomize a search, upload photo's through their phone camera, plot their location through GPS. These are things you'll actually have to build specifically for the mobile device - you obviously don't want this functionality for users on a desktop!
There may also be a lot of functionality on your main website that you want simplified and altered significantly on the mobile experience. If you have an iPhone, think of how different the main Facebook website is from the iPhone app version of Facebook. On the latter, the functionality is simplified significantly from how you would use it on the website (no instant messaging for example).
An added benefit of mobile websites is that you can include a link at the bottom of the site "Click here to leave the mobile version". This way, you can present your user with choice so they default to the mobile version, but can always load the desktop version on their phone if they so choose.
2) Weight
With responsive, again, the HTML page is exactly the same regardless of what device you're viewing it on. On a mobile device, every bit of information a user has to download counts - because users often have slower internet connections and their phones have less memory than a desktop computer.
So if your main website has a lot of intensive graphics, videos, and sounds that a user has to download, responsive design is not going to change that when the user is viewing it on a smart phone. A mobile web app on the other hand is a completely different site, made specifically for phones, and there are a lot of techniques developers can employ to make the page as fast and lightweight as possible.
I won't get too much into the technical stuff here, but it would include using HTML5 local storage techniques, limiting the amount of http requests, keeping Javascript libraries as compressed and minimal as possible, loading smaller images and a whole lot more.
3) Business Model
If you have a blog, chances are your website will be used the same way regardless of what device you're user is accessing it with. Blog's are always for finding and reading content, and sometimes commenting on a post. In that case, responsive design is probably a perfect solution, since it allows the content to be optimally viewed on a phone.
Now on the other hand, if your website involves a lot of user functionality, like the aforementioned Facebook, which includes adding photos, tagging pictures, posting content, finding friends and more, it's much better to design a specific mobile experience that varies greatly from the desktop experience.
And you don't have to be as big as Facebook either. There are a lot of companies whose desktop websites wouldn't translate well as merely a shrunken down mobile version, but would benefit from a true mobile app. Some examples may be banks, movie theatres, restaurants, concert venues, e-commerce stores, social sites... the list goes on.
The other factor to consider too is whether or not you want to sell your app and/or make it available on the iTunes Store or Android Marketplace. If you do, responsive is not going to work. On the other hand, you could make a native iPhone/iPad/Android app, OR build a mobile web app using open standards and using the insanely clever PhoneGap, you can package your web app as if it is a native app. This will enable you to use the phone hardware like contact lists, voice and camera, and will also allow you to sell it on app stores.
Closing thoughts
As a general rule, I like to think of it like this: If your website is meant to be viewed, Responsive Design is an amazingly simple technique to please visitors on your site (in fact, I think that building in Responsive is the first place every company should start when they want to dip their toes in the mobile landscape).
On the other hand, if your website is primarily meant for users to interact with (games, accounts, videos, social, e-commerce etc.) then a mobile web app is an important investment worth making.
Posted On July 3rd, 2011 Author Kyle Racki
Filed Under 1
When I first got really into web design and development in the mid-2000’s - it was largely because of learning about web standards, CSS and Flash/Actionscript.
Things got a bit stagnant in the front-end technology department for a few years and there really wasn’t much new - it was all about refining one’s understanding of the principles of website development.
However in the last year or so, I’ve felt a revitalization of the interest and passion in front-end development I first felt years ago. Largely because of the following:
Hosted Fonts
Remember the days when you only had Arial, Times, Georgia or Verdana to choose from? There was a time when if you wanted to choose any font you wanted, you had to resort to Flash.
Today, virtually any font can be used on the web, and without tricks like Cufon or sIFR. The best way to use fonts on the web now are to either use a font provider, like Google Fonts (free) or Typekit (paid). We have a Typekit account and use it for many clients, but also use Google Fonts when we need unlimited bandwidth, or there just happens to be an appropriate font in their list I want to use.
Another option is using the @font-face property in CSS that allows you to host fonts on your server and embed them in your CSS.
Whatever method is chosen, it’s incredibly liberating to not be limited to a small handful of old fonts that have been used on every website for the last 15 years.
Web design, once the ugly sibling of print design, now rivals and in some ways surpasses print design in it’s flexibility, interactivity and near limitless creative potential.
HTML5
The web community has been swooning over HTML5 for over a year now. Even completely non-technical people seem to be excited about the possibilities with HTML5, although few of them really know why.
The truth is, much of the awesomeness of HTML5 is not supported by the majority of modern browsers at the time of this writing. But the future possibilities are very cool. Some of which are being able play video and audio - another nail in the coffin for Flash; being able to do things with web forms like have calendar drop downs and slider widgets without the use of Javascript; And some great features for mobile devices.
Right now at Headspace, we’ve begun gradually integrating HTML5 into our sites - although most users and clients would never know the difference. Just having a simpler doctype definition, and using some of the new semantic elements like
< article > < section > < header >
- not exciting stuff for the majority of people, but it’s a start as the browsers are still working to meet the specification for HTML5.
CSS3
This is something that the non-techies and clients aren’t talking about, but they should. The awesomeness of CSS3 is exciting because the results of which are visible on the screen, and the time it saves developers can reduce costs for companies.
Here’s an example: In the past if you wanted rounded corners on a white content box, you would have to cut 4 images of each of the corners and then write a lot of bloated markup (HTML) to contain the images within CSS. Now with CSS3, it’s one simple rule in your style sheets:
border-radius: 15px;
No images needed. Some of the other great things you can do in CSS3 are drop shadows, rotating, gradients, scaling, transparency and even animation. All of this is done without using a single image. CSS can now do things that were only possible within Photoshop.
The best part is, all the modern major browsers, (Except IE 7 and 8) support most of the cool features. Because it’s not universally supported in every way, CSS3 is now mainly used to enhance website design. That way users on modern browsers can have an enhanced experience whereas users on more limited, older browser still get the same site, but miss out on some visual “pizzazz” - though they would never really know the difference.
For example, a user on Firefox might see drop shadows and rounded corners, but a user on Internet Explorer would just see a plain white box. Not a big deal. A user on Safari might see an animated colour transition when they mouse over a link, but a user on Firefox might just see it go from one colour to another with no in between animation.
This is the approach and method we’re taking at Headspace, and it is the approach of most of the current web community until all the old browsers die and modern browser universally support all of CSS3.
Death of IE6
Speaking of old browser dying, this is very exciting. Internet Explorer 6, though once considered an innovative browser when it came out 10 years ago, quickly became the bane of every web developers’ existence with it’s buggy, inconsistent rendering engine and lack of support for nearly everything considered standard. It always required re-doing a lot of work and constant testing and tweaking along with hair-pulling.
The frustrating thing was that for a long time, IE6 had the majority of the market, so it couldn’t be ignored. But Internet Explorer has been steadily losing command of the market. Just look at these stats.
In 2006 Internet Explorer had 60% of the market. As of May 2011, IE as a whole only has 24.9% and of that 24 percent, IE6 only has 2.4%—a very small percentage which is mostly made up of old government office computers that haven’t changed operating system’s in 10 years for “security” reasons.
Last year Google announced that it wouldn’t support IE6 anymore, and that for us at Headspace was the final death blow.
Sadly, Internet Explorer 7 has become the new 6 - as web standards keep progressing, IE7 is looking more and more out of date. The great thing is that Microsoft has been improving IE with every version, so 9 is looking very promising and should replace the older versions much faster than the rate of adoption before.
JQuery
Okay, admittedly JQuery is not new - it’s been around since 2006. But it’s vast amount of plugins and support and near universal adoption by many of the worlds biggest websites makes it that much more accessible to developers. For the non-technical: jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development.
With JQuery, you can make your site behave like the once revered Flash websites of old, but all within a standards-based website that still works on mobile phones. Using AJAX (which is Javascript) you can make page requests without the browser refreshing the page. A good example of how powerful this can be is Google Maps. When you zoom and pan the map, Google is making requests to a server on the fly, without your whole page refreshing.
While I am trying to learn JQuery more, Ricky Ferris has become quite the ninja with it, and having in-house expertise with it is a great tool to add to our arsenal. It’s also fun for me to design cool interactions knowing what can be accomplished with JQuery and knowing Ricky will find a way to pull it off.
Mobile and Responsive Design
There’s no question that mobile is the way things are going, and in fact, have already gone. But it’s been the elephant in the room for a lot of web designers who have just gotten browsers tamed and are anxious about having yet another swarm of hardware to design and test on - especially one that scales your designs down to fit in the palm of the users’ hands.
We at Headspace have really begun to embrace mobile but have only scratched the surface. Last year we’ve begun adding iPhone development to our skill-set, thanks to Nick Ross’ foray into the world of Objective C, Cocoa and the Apple development environment. We now have a couple of apps under our belt, and I’ve personally found that designing iPhone apps is much more challenging than you would think. While there’s a lot of standard interface elements like buttons, forms, lists, scrollers etc. - the exact best way to implement them for a given app idea is not always clear and it takes a lot of thought and planning to get it right.
We’ve had a few companies request apps that work on all mobile hardware, not just Apple. So recently I’ve been looking into the Sencha framework for assisting with developing HTML5 apps. Sencha helps with letting us develop advanced apps that look and feel like native apps, but are compatible with Android and Blackberry.
Responsive Design is one of the most intriguing things about web design today. The term comes from buildings that are made “responsive”. They adjust heat and lighting automatically to the amount of people that are in the building or rooms at any given time.
Similarly, responsive websites adjust themselves automatically to the users screen size. Look at this site for many examples of well designed responsive sites.
Notice how if the user is on a widescreen monitor, the site might have 4 columns and a huge image, whereas if the same site is viewed on a tablet, like iPad, it instantly adjusts to 2 columns and scales down the image. And if the same site is viewed on a smart phone, is scales to one column and stacks the content vertically.
This approach to design is fun and challenging, and once again, Ricky has demonstrated a knack for coding sites in this way. For me, Responsive Design is the single most exciting thing about web design today, and something we are beginning to build into every project.
Posted On May 18th, 2011 Author Kyle Racki
Filed Under Business, Marketing, 0
I was recently doing business in the US when a potential client for a large organization asked about the value of social media. He said a prominent person posted something on Twitter akin to “Wow, the sun finally came out today. I want to get to some long overdue gardening”. His point was, who cares and why should his followers be subjected to such pointless drivel?
I’m going to use two examples to illustrate the value of needless information in social media:
Celebrity Magazines
It always astounds me how celebrity gossip magazines/blogs stay in business. But they do because there are millions of people out there who care what Brangelina ate today, where they went, what they bought at the store. And when a celebrity starts a twitter account, look out! Millions of followers are ready and willing to read when their last bowel movements were.
Advertising
How many of us look forward to Super Bowl ads? Have you ever noticed that some of the best ads that we enjoy watching do not sell with information or logic? They often sell with emotion and humor - two powerful weapons of any marketer. We don’t enjoy them because they gave us information and told us about their product in a direct manner, we enjoy them because they entertain us, and over time we associate their brand with positive feelings.
Social Media can build your brand
So to answer the question; Who cares what you ate for breakfast? Everyone who follows you does. If they have cared to subscribe to your content, whether it’s Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Four Square or any other social network you use for your company, then people care about what you are doing.
Does that mean they are necessarily going to comment or respond any time you make small talk that is weather, food, travel related? Not really. Sure, constantly talking about irrelevant personal data will get annoying and people will stop following you. The key is to mix it up and be yourself, just like you would if you were talking to someone in person.
Talk about things that matter to you and throw in a few trivial statements about whatever you happen to be thinking about. If you’re funny in real life, then be funny on the web. Some posts can be informative, some can be direct self-promotion, and others can be statements on the weather.
What’s the point you may ask? If someone is following your posts, then small talk shows that you’re human, that you have feelings and that you don’t just use Facebook to talk about new deals you’re offering. And the more someone trusts you and associates your brand with positive things like gardening in the spring, or enjoying a fine ale at the local pub, then the more likely they are to give you a call when they need work done, or visit your site to buy products. That is just marketing, and the principles haven’t changed just because social media came along.