Web Design, Implementation, Support

Responsive Web Design

You can visit  a “non-responsive” website on a smartphone — it will usually appear miniaturized and to navigate around the site you have to swipe and zoom a lot but it can be done. The difference with a responsive site is that when you arrive on your smartphone (or a smaller tablet) the site will appear “full size”,  with instantly readable text and larger buttons, and scrolling will only be up and down instead of right to left AND up and down. A responsive website doesn’t shrink to fit in a smaller device, it rearranges to fit. Content that displays in multiple columns on a large monitor will reflow to display in a single column on a smartphone or small tablet.

Tablets come in a large array of sizes and change from wide and short to tall and narrow (some are more square). We build sites to be able to reflow from three/four columns to two, then down to one. Your tablet may display pages in any of those configurations depending on the specific viewport’s dimensions and orientation,

The great thing is: One Website, All Devices. You can deploy and support a single website and have it work on a full range of sizes, negating the need for separate desktop and mobile websites.

Pay Attention to Text Section Widths

Super-wide text blocks are now common on wide screens and are difficult to read. People can read text comfortably in blocks up to about 750 pixels in width. Stretch wider and the eye starts having trouble knowing where the next line is and easily skips lines, causing confusion. Wide headlines with large letters are readable but not information-packed text blocks. At TH we make sure to layout text in columns or smaller containers to avoid this problem.

We work to make your site content readable for all device sizes!

Google recommends “Responsive”

“Using responsive web design has multiple advantages, including:

• It keeps your desktop and mobile content on a single URL, which is easier for your users to interact with, share, and link to and for Google’s algorithms to assign the indexing properties to your content.
• Google can discover your content more efficiently as we wouldn’t need to crawl a page with the different Googlebot user agents to retrieve and index all the content.”

Web Analytics

Web Analytics is the phrase used to encapsulate the interpretation of data collected by the servers where websites reside. As more and more businesses seek to develop a greater presence on the web, it has become increasingly important—particularly for businesses engaged in e-commerce—activities to get specific answers to some basic questions:

• How many visits does the site log on a yearly, monthly, weekly, daily or hourly basis?
• From where did the traffic originate?
• How long does the typical visitor stay at the site?
• Are visitors viewing pages where critical information resides?
• What’s the number of visitors to sales generated ratio? (the conversion rate.)

With this type of data, working in conjunction with an informed web development/design team, you can tailor your site to work in concert with all of your marketing efforts.

There are several Web Analytics programs available. We can recommend, implement, and manage a program for you, or teach you how to use one.

Website Speed

A number of factors affect web page load time, including but not limited to:

• number and “weight” of images/graphics (i.e. have the photos/images been optimized?);
• complexity/quantity of CSS stylesheets and scripts;
• references to external resources (such as Google Fonts, external javascript/jquery libraries, etc.);
• use of external resources (does your video play on your server or at YouTube?);
• the number of http requests required to load the page.

(Http requests happen each time your computer/device asks the server to send it the pieces/parts that make up the web page. Each graphic, photo, script, stylesheet, chunk of html, video, audio file etc. generates an http request.)

There are several techniques that can be used to reduce the number of http requests and speed up the load time of photos/graphics. The nature of the website and the site’s content will dictate which techniques are best for that site and where trade-offs are required. These considerations are built-in components of our process when designing and building websites at TH Design.

The ideal website, from the point of view of load-speed and easy Google spider crawling, would have nothing but text. Visual elements, animation, audio/video etc. slow sites down but also make them more interesting and functional. So if you test your website and don’t score 100% across all metrics don’t despair! Go for a high score and know that improvements are possible. Call us if you need help!