The modern world is the world of internet, websites, digitalization, technology, smartphones, wearable devices, and lots more. With people, businesses, and the world becoming more and more tech-savvy, the website designers now need to look much more beyond adaptive and responsive website designing.
- This will ensure that they, as well as their digital assets, make the best use of the opportunities of the digital landscape.
- It will also ensure at the same time that they overcome the challenges that are associated with it.
The web designers and web development companies now will need to look at all different aspects of it, such as:
- The humblest HTML codes
- More responsive web design practices
- Creating native mobile apps
- Cloud computing
- Creating web-based apps and
- Mobile-enabled websites.
The web design companies also need to follow the latest as well as the upcoming trends and best practices in website and application design and development of the same. All these are now possible with the phenomenal growth and availability of the latest techniques and technology in web design and development.
Creating adaptive websites
The modern age is of adaptive web design. This is a unique website development technique. In this process, attempts are made to make a website look appealing irrespective of the type of device used to view it.
Ideally, an adaptive web design does a lot of things at the same time such as:
- Gauging the device used to access the site
- Changing the content delivered according to each device depending on the available space
- Altering the size of the designing area and more.
This means that it will look different on each device. For example, when a desktop or a laptop computer is used to view the website, it will show the entire content at once. However, being an adaptive website, it will just show threadbare content of it when a mobile phone is used to access it. Adaptive website design comes in very handy for those specific websites that have rich media content such as audio or video.
This technique uses sophisticated user-agent detection scripts that identify the device accessing the site and instruct these elements of the content simply not to load or show when a mobile device is used. This script ensures that the best possible version of the website is loaded depending on the available capacity and screen area of that accessing device.
Responsive website design
If you take a look at the internet time about five years back, you will see that it has become much more complicated. Previously, a web design company simply had to code or create a website with a resolution of 800 or 1024 maximum. All they had to do is design for 800 and then spread the pattern in the background to 1024. It made the website look suitable for both these resolutions.
However, things are not that easy for companies like BigDropInc. Now they have to focus on the fact that more and more devices are used by the people to access the internet. This made web designing very complicated. They now need to create websites that will be accessible and legible across all devices such as:
- Desktops
- Laptops
- Tablets and even
- Smartphones.
This calls for the difference in sizes, designs, and resolution. This is where responsive website design came into the picture. This eliminates the ‘one size fits all’ approach to designing websites. This approach has also eliminated the need for companies to create different sites to access through various devices. This single responsive website is the best and most cost-effective approach to make a website look good on all devices.
The theory behind
Responsive websites follow a complicated approach, which, when simply put, means it will change instantly to fit within the screen size of the device being used to view it. In addition to that, it will also change different other elements according to the scale, such as:
- The layout
- The design and even
- The content components.
This ensures that everything accommodates within the screen of the device and provide a better viewing and user experience or UX.
Looking at the complex theory of responsive websites in a complicated way, the design involves using different things such as:
- A number of flexible grids
- More scalable images
- Far better HTTP protocols
- More information on the extreme pixel width
- A CSS3 element and attribute such as media query and
- Conditional application of different CSS styles.
All these ensure that the web design responds well and indeed to the requirements of the devices used and displays only that part of the web page content that the designer feels appropriate and has defined.
Limitations to overcome
Creating such responsive websites also has some limitations. Here are some of those that you will need to know and master to create a responsive website for your company:
- You will face a lot of difficulty in creating complex websites by using responsive web design technology.
- Since all responsive website designs rely heavily on CSS media queries, and not all mobile devices are compatible with it, you will need to be more careful while designing a webpage.
- Resizing the image is another issue because you will need to maintain the standard off handling the photos according to that specified by W3C.
- The speed can be slow in such cases if you use your own script to handle the images because the results may vary from one device to another, and typically such a website will first download the complete picture without resizing it.
- Presentation of tabular data can be another issue for you to manage because responsive websites tend to be simple and work in a set of patterns while moving items.
- Browser compatibility is another thing to look into seriously because people still use older versions of Internet Explorer and therefore, cannot view these websites correctly.
Lastly, connectivity is another issue because mobile users generally have much lower speed in comparison to desktop users. Speed is usually slow because responsive web designs do not remove the extra HTML code or any unnecessary JavaScript.
Native mobile or mobile web applications
The web designers now also have to choose between a native mobile app and a mobile web app while designing. There are significant differences between the two, and both of these comes with its own set of merits and demerits.
- Native mobile applications are typically programs that are usually found in the mobile device of the user. These can be downloaded or purchased from any online store or website. The code of these programs is stored in the device itself.
- Mobile web applications, on the other hand, simply use the browser of the mobile device to access the app. That means, in simple terms, it is a web application that is customized to fit into the small screen of mobile phones. The users do not need to install anything because these are typically organized over the Internet, and the server-side does all the data processing jobs.
Apart from the above, there is yet another type of app that the designers also create nowadays. This is the hybrid application. These apps run inside a container in the mobile device and use its browser engine.
However, these apps do not use the browser itself to render the pages. These apps usually run the HTML protocol, process the JavaScript locally and also have a specific layer that enables them to access different hardware such as camera, contacts, GPS, and others.
Using cloud computing
Cloud computing is another new thing that web designers must look into. This is the feature that improves the performance level and functionality of the hardware as well as the software of the device. This typically depends on the accessibility of more dynamically scalable capabilities that are necessarily IT-enabled. This technique usually uses a third-party vendor over the network to perform.
The main thing here is the dynamically scalable property. If you put it in simple terms, it means that:
- This allows you to ramp up or down the resources of the third party as and when required
- The physical hardware or software may be on different devices and networks and even across different geo-locations.
When it comes to the services provided by cloud computing, it offers a wide range of it that includes:
- Software
- Infrastructure
- Storage and also
- The OS platform.
All these services are typically accessed over the Internet through different cloud service providers who have a diverse range of access models to provide these services.
The cloud model is much different from traditional outsourcing. This is because the customers do not need to handover their IT resources for managing. All they have to do instead is to plug into the cloud. This will act as a computer or an internal data center and provide the same functions.
Cloud computing is very helpful in reducing the cost of IT management and operations of a company by a significant margin. It is the result of modern and sophisticated web technology. Most importantly, there is no risk to the security as it works over a network, therefore, needing less data control.
