As with everything, it’s all about communication. Many clients expect a visual design up front, because that’s what they’re used to getting. They don’t know any better. Your job is to explain to them why this is impossible. Enlighten them about the millions of different interaction methods and feature sets out there, and help them understand that you cannot capture all of that in a static design. But before we start flipping things around, let’s take a quick stroll down memory lane, just so we know where we’ve come from and where we are now.
Read more…
Eight years is a long time on the web, yet for us it really doesn’t feel like a long journey at all. We’d love to share a few things that we’ve learned over the last years about the performance challenges of this very website and about the work we’ve done recently. If you want to craft a fast responsive website, you might find a few interesting nuggets worth considering. In this article you will find a little story about the things that happened on this little website over the last year. Thanks for keeping us reading throughout all these years. It means a lot. You are quite smashing indeed. You should know that.
Read more…
As responsive design has evolved, we now more often start with the content and then set breakpoints when the content “breaks.” This means that you might end up with quite a few content-centric breakpoints and no particular devices or form factors on which to test your website. However, we need to continually monitor a design’s performance with real traffic. Content-centric breakpoints are definitely the way to go, but they also mean that monitoring your website to identify when it breaks is more important. In this article, Jon Arne Sæterås and Luca Passani will demonstrate how WURFL.js and Google Analytics can work together to show performance metrics across form factors. No more guessing.
Read more…
Using the data from over 22 billion email subscribers, we determined what designers should prioritize when creating an email newsletter, both this year and beyond. Which email clients and platforms should we be supporting now? Should we learn all of the email workarounds or just use existing builders and frameworks? In this article, Ros Hodgekiss will interpret the numbers from her “Email Marketing Trends” report to help designers like you make informed decisions about what works and what doesn’t in email newsletters.
Read more…
New tools have emerged to address the challenges of responsive web design. And there is that’s been a leap forward in productivity for the team that Richard Knight works with. Its name is Webflow, and it could be the solution to the problems you face with static design comps produced in Photoshop and Fireworks. In this article, Richard will explore the advantages of Webflow and how you can use it to build responsive websites today. He will take you step by step through the process of creating a responsive website layout for a real project, and identify Webflow’s advantages and where it comes up short.
Read more…
Responsive web design is great, but it’s not a silver bullet. In this article, Maximiliano Firtman will cover the relationship between the mobile web and responsive design, starting with how to apply responsive design intelligently, why responsive design should not be your website’s goal, and ending with the performance issues of the technique to help us understand the problem. According to Guy Podjarny’s research, 72% of responsive websites deliver the same number of bytes regardless of screen size, even on slow mobile network connections. Not all users will wait for your website to load. With just a basic understanding of the problem, you can minimize this loss.
Read more…
Back then, when every home had broadband and before anyone had a smartphone, we were living in the Golden Age of web development. We never knew how easy our jobs were. Because of all the things we have to support now, testing has become really difficult and also super-expensive. Now with responsive web design, we have at least 15 browsers working on a myriad of different-sized devices, with many different input types, multiple pixel resolutions and hugely varying connection speeds. There must be a better way to deal with the problem that responsive design has created for testing. In this article, Tom Maslen will devise a testing strategy so that you don’t have to test every device every time you want to update a live website.
Read more…
Because the W3C’s mission from the outset has been to make the web accessible, accessibility features are built into its specifications. As responsible designers, we have the job of creating compelling web experiences without disrupting the inclusive features of a simpler design. We need to find a way to adopt new tools and techniques to keep the playing field level. It’s time to embrace change. This article is an excerpt of a chapter in the eBook that introduces many of the ideas and techniques presented.
Read more…
Responsive web design has turned out to be somewhat of a case study in the law of unintended consequences, with one of them being breakpoint paranoia. But even without the undue influence that media queries exerts on your selection of these breakpoints, these might not be the droids we’re looking for. In this article, Obinwanne Hill will look at breakpoints beyond screen size and explore different possibilities and practical approaches to using them to create truly adaptive experiences on the web.
Read more…
In this article, Biran Krall, will look at how the need of a more involved design and implementation process, due to responsive design complexities, create opportunities to work together better. We have to kill the mentality that there is an assembly line of workers waiting for it to be their turn, and instead embrace more focused collaboration across the project’s entire team.
Read more…
