More of your customers are now Mobile
Nowadays, more and more of your customers are going mobile,
IE: using Smartphones or tablets to access the internet.
This trend is continuing as 472 million smart
phones were shipped in 2011, compared
with just 415 million PC’s
Your customers user experience
These new mobile users still expect the same web experience
they have got when they visited your website in the past.
As a desktop or laptop has a typical resolution of 1280×1024, this is brought
down to just 480×320 on a Smartphone so this presents difficulties in
displaying your website content to this new demographic of users
How to check how your website displays on these new devices
This tool allows you to check what your customers will see when they visit your
website if they are using an iPhone (the most popular Smartphone).
Test your website here: http://www.testiphone.com
Previous solutions aren’t feasible anymore
In the past the solution was to simply create a mobile version of your website
with its own separate layout specifically geared towards the smaller screen of the
mobile phone, this worked fine when there was a small number of devices to contend with,
this has changed as today where we now have a wide range of devices all using varying screen
sizes and resolutions so a new solution is needed. Also remember that for every separate mobile
version you’re building you will also have to maintain, so soon the necessity
for a separate tablet version and then smart TV version means having separate versions
is perhaps not feasible anymore.
A new solution is available
A new next generation of responsive website is now available and fast establishing itself as
a standard within the industry, In simple terms a responsive website senses
the device that’s requesting it to be viewed on, it then renders itself using fluid
grids and flexible images to display correctly on the
particular device for that particular session.
The content layout remains constant until at a certain point (called a breakpoint) this is
when the site layout reduces by a single column, So it shrinks from three columns on a desktop,
to two columns for a tablet and then to a single column of content on a Smartphone, sensing
the device its being viewed on. (See the image above as an example)
Cost effective option
A cost effective options is to create a responsive website using a popular platform
like wordpress and ready-made responsive themes.
Our associates over at Next generation use this technique and can offer effective
responsive websites at really competitive rates, they also allow you spread the development
cost over a period of 12 months, so no major upfront costs to incur.
Thanks the TIB Team