Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Responsive Web Design movement

Hey everybody,
I wanted to introduce a concept that has been sweeping through the web development community in 2011, and is becoming very popular. It's called responsive design.

What it means is that the website design becomes fluid (flexible) based on the device it is beeing viewed on. One of the key elements of this approach is that it really takes the "app" out of the equation for publishers, saving them money and increasing the speed at which they can publish.

I wanted to show some examples of what it is. First, a live example that some of you might have seen:
Boston Globe website - don't mind the actual colors or how it's layed out, resize the browser window to see how the content adopts to the smaller viewing area. If you can, check it out on your iPad or smartphone.

There are free frameworks that allow web developers create these responsive designs. One of my favorites, that I will be using for my own business projects, is Initializr. Here's a simple demo template of a responsive design. Do the same thing, resize browser window to see how it fluidly adopts to it.
Responsive demo

What do you think? Any thoughts or comments?

1 comment:

  1. That would certainly be ideal. How compatible is the starting point of our current homepage with this. (I'm not asking technically, but more design-wise. If it's stretched and shrunk, will it still look good?) If it does, I'm all for it.

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