The contemporary web designer's new age tools are creative colors, intuitive navigation, and simplicity of layout. And contemporary web design is no longer the preserve of desktops and laptops. It includes an entirely new set of canvasses – the portable screen – smartphones, netbooks, tablets and a host of smarter, slimmer and sharper devices.
Let's look closer at one such canvas, the mobile website. Until recently, a made-for-mobile website meant a watered down version of the original. The result was empty design that catered only to function, not aesthetic. Technology-aided design has now made it possible to retain the magic of your original design, whatever the canvas.
Technology has upgraded to the extent that navigation is no longer slave to the mouse and your destination is now at your fingertips, literally. Tablets, smartphones and some desktops use touchscreens. That's why the question – does your design facilitate fingertip navigation?
As a web designer, have you ever asked how much of your design is mouse-oriented? Consider this, the links on your webpage light up on mouseover. However, there’s no mouseover for touchscreens. So how do you indicate hyperlinks, or drop-down menus, or any such navigation element that's controlled by the mouse?
Now let's talk about user experience elements. When was the last time you saw horizontal scrolling in a website? But horizontal scrolling is appropriate for touchscreens, especially tablets. Check out any of the numerous magazine or RSS reader apps for tablets to see how magazine-style layouts and horizontal scrolling are suitable for touchscreen browsing, allowing readers to flip through your content with ease and simplicity.
Lastly, consider using liquid layouts – layouts that are based on percentages of the current browser window's size and expand or contract when the user changes the window size. Liquid width layouts allow efficient use of the space provided by any web browser window or screen resolution. They are preferred by designers who have to display a lot of information in limited screen space, as they remain consistent in size and relative page widths.
In 2011, make these suggestions a part of your commitment to responsive design because you're no longer designing only for screen resolution size. You're designing for users who change their viewing orientation from vertical to horizontal and who browse the web from devices that can be no bigger than their pockets. If your design is not flexible to meet the challenges of the new decade, you will be reduced to a hangover of the bygone 2010.
