Web Design Has Changed Forever!

Web design used to be so much easier. We would design a website and people would view that design in pretty much the same way, i.e. on a desktop computer screen.

Nowadays, that's all changed. More and more people are viewing websites on an iPad, mobile phone, laptop or even TV. These devices all have different screen sizes and shapes (portrait or landscape). This has forced us to completely change the way we think about design.

A full size website does not perform well on a mobile device. They are hard to navigate and slow to load. This negatively affects sales conversion rates.

We have had to simplify our web designs and make them fluid, so that they can automatically adapt to these different devices. This approach is called responsive design.

With responsive websites, the content of a web page dynamically resizes and rearranges itself to best fit the screen it is being viewed on. The content is the same but the code recognises what device is beinge used and then delivers a different style sheet which changes the design of the website accordingly.

This approach ensures that the user can see a website in it's best format for the device they happen to be using. The conversion rate of responsive websites is far higher than standard websites as it is difficult to use a full 'desktop' version of a website on a mobile device for example.

Touchscreen

Another big game changer has been touchscreen. The fact that people increasing use their fingers, instead of a mouse, to navigate a website, has brought about some big changes to web and mobile design. For example, buttons have to be bigger and navigation much simpler eg complex drop down menus or rollovers dont work well with touchscreen.

Touchscreen has also allowed for longer pages which people can scroll down with their finger, rather than breaking pages up with lots of 'next page' links.

A lot has been talked about designing for smaller screens on mobiles yet the future for the internet also lies with television. TV screens are much larger than computers so websites will also have to scale up as well as down to fit this format.

Summary

Although all of these changes have made our designers' lives harder, it has brought a lot of positive change. We have to make designs simpler and content more concise, which actually makes for a better website, no matter which device it is viewed upon.